Over the last two years, Metaculus has been running a series of tournaments to benchmark AI's accuracy in predicting future events. These tournaments, now part of our broader [<u>FutureEval</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/futureeval/) benchmark, pit baseline LLMs, complex custom bots, and human Pros against each other to collectively push the boundaries of forecasting performance. We are wrapping up the Summer Bot Tournament and are now prepping for the \$50k Fall 2026 FutureEval Bot Tournament!

Joining the tournament is a great way to help further innovation and learning in the AI forecasting space, hone your AI development skills, and earn rewards for strong performance!

## Where Things Stand

Before getting into Fall, a quick update for those who haven't been following along:

* **Spring 2026 analyses are out:** We published three writeups from the Spring tournament. Here are the headline findings most relevant to bot makers:
  * [<u>Pros only narrowly retain their lead</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/45373/spring-2026-futureeval-analysis/) (Bot vs Pro analysis): Pro forecasters beat bots, but without statistical significance. The bot team improved notably over the last year. Nine of ten individual Pros beat every individual bot.
  * [<u>Spring 2026 FutureEval bot-maker survey</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/45382/bot-survey-spring-2026/): We compared survey features with tournament performance. No results were statistically significant. Using a frontier model had notable correlations with performance, and focusing on research appears to be a good bet.
  * [<u>Advice from bot makers to bot makers (Spring 2026)</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/45336/bot-maker-advice-spring-2026/): Common themes in the advice bot makers gave each other: simplicity beats complexity, research quality is a bottleneck, and bots need full context on the question (for example, they should not assume the question has already been resolved).
* **Track AI progress vs Pros in real time:** The Metaculus [<u>FutureEval</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/futureeval/) Model Leaderboard shows how well Pros are currently doing over time vs frontier models. It uses a scoring method made for this type of comparison and provides a more continuous comparison of Pros and AI than the season-by-season snapshots provided by our bot tournament leaderboards. According to the leaderboard, our non-agentic baseline bots are still far behind Pros.

## The Details

For those new to our benchmarking efforts, here is an overview of the two bot tournament series that are part of the FutureEval:

* **\$50,000 Fall/Spring/Summer Bot Tournament:** Our primary bot tournament runs three times a year and aligns with the Metaculus Cup timeframe. Each season features a \$50k prize pool and 300-400 questions. Questions will be sourced from custom questions made specifically for this tournament and also from questions from the main Metaculus site. You can find the upcoming Fall tournament [<u>here</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/fall-futureeval-2026/).
* **\$1,000 Bi-Weekly MiniBench:** MiniBench is a series of back-to-back two-week-long \$1k tournaments of \~60 questions each. Question creation and resolution are fully automated using AI. The purpose of this tournament is to provide fast feedback loops for participants to test the quality of their bots and to lower the barrier to entry for new participants. It also helps us highlight the best forecasting LLMs faster than once a quarter. Due to automation, we expect MiniBench to be slightly noisier, but it should provide a useful point of reference. You can find the list of all past MiniBench tournaments [<u>here</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/aib/minibench/).

## Summer → Fall Transition

Updates specific to wrapping up Summer and rolling into Fall:

* **Summer End Date:** Summer questions are done, and no more new questions will be added to the Summer bot tournament.
* **Summer Resolve Date:** Most Summer questions are scheduled to resolve by **September 15, 2026**. Any lagging resolutions will be fully cut off on **September 30, 2026**.
* **Summer Prize Money:** Prizes will be distributed after all Summer questions are resolved and prize-winner verification (including survey completion) is complete. Prizes for MiniBench will be distributed at the same time. **Target payout: October/November 2026.**
* **Fall Warmup Start:** The first Fall MiniBench starts on **September 21, 2026 (00:00 UTC)** and will act as a warmup round. New (and returning) competitors can use it and the Fall practice questions as a sandbox before things get competitive. Note that most questions launch in the first few days of MiniBench, and that there will usually be no questions in the second week of MiniBench.
* **Fall Start Date:** New questions for the Fall Bot Tournament will start opening on **September 28, 2026**. The first 1 to 2 weeks will be slow to allow more time for late entrants, and then the pace will pick up.
* **MiniBench Continues:** MiniBench will continue without pause across the transition.
* **Testing Area:** We have a dedicated test area with practice questions for bot makers found [<u>here</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/bot-testing-area/). This has one question of every question type. Use the ID "bot-testing-area" or "32977". Only Binary, Numeric, Discrete, and Multiple Choice will be used in the FutureEval bot tournaments.
* **Testing Your Bot:** Outside of the testing area, new competitors can use the Fall tournament practice questions or the warmup MiniBench to test for bugs.

## Set Up a New Bot With a 30-Minute Walkthrough

You can find instructions on how to participate [<u>here</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/futureeval/participate/). Here is an overview:

* **30-minute Walkthrough:** You can set up a bot using our [<u>video walkthrough</u>](https://www.loom.com/share/fc3c1a643b984a15b510647d8f760685) that uses our [<u>template bot GitHub repo</u>](https://github.com/Metaculus/metac-bot-template).
* **A More Advanced Starting Point:** [<u>nostreambot</u>](https://github.com/No-Stream/metaculus-bot) is an open-source bot built by one of the FutureEval participants. Nostreambot is agentic, unlike the Metaculus template bot. It has placed in the top 10 in Spring and is currently in the top 20 in Summer.&nbsp;
* **Documentation:** Please see additional documentation on our [<u>resource page</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/38928/futureeval-resources-page/).
* **Free LLM and Search Credits:** Metaculus helps sponsor the LLM and search costs of participants in FutureEval bot tournaments via donations from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as well as a partnership with AskNews. See more info below in the "Upkeep" section.
* **Join anytime:** The tournament runs continuously until questions stop opening a few weeks before January 1, 2027. Competitors can join any time during this window and will start in the middle of the leaderboard with 0 points. New bot makers can enter an early MVP of their bot and improve it over the course of the tournament.

## New Policies

* **Required participant form**: All participants are required to fill out the first section of our [<u>participation form</u>](https://forms.gle/aQdYMq9Pisrf1v7d8). There are only 3 required questions, so it should be pretty quick. This form is used to help us learn about the demographics and motivations of our community in FutureEval, amplify individual projects/research, and also to collect applications for LLM credits.
* **Incremental funding**: This season, with some bot makers, we will be experimenting with distributing LLM credits incrementally. We will give some bot makers an initial \~\$100 to participate in MiniBench and FutureEval bot tournament questions. If there is above-average performance in MiniBench, then their key will automatically get additional funding. Open-source bots will also get additional funding bonuses (around double the standard allocation, liable to change) after an initial performance evaluation window. We expect this algorithm to change or be dropped over the season as we run this experiment, though we hope this will allow us to fund more bots and prioritize funding based on actual performance.
* **Old private bot comments have a new API endpoint:** To save space, bot comments that are more than 30 days old and over 1,000 characters are now archived once per day. The comment list endpoint will only return the first 200 characters of an archived comment, with a note appended explaining how to get the full text. To retrieve the full text, call api/comments/\[id]/ for that comment (limited to 8 calls per 10 seconds). Archived comments have is\_text\_archived set on the comment object. If you have code that reads your bot's past comments (e.g., for backtesting or evaluation), you'll need to update it.
* **Commercial bots not eligible for prizes (redistributed to hobbyists and open-source bots):** For Fall 2026, commercial bots are not eligible for prizes in FutureEval. This policy is a trade-off and helps us encourage innovation by better supporting bot makers who are not able to fund their bot in the same way a commercial org can. A commercial bot is any bot that is built or operated on behalf of a for-profit entity that has three or more founders/employees/contractors. This includes any bots built using company resources, and any bot who works for a company with a commercial bot. This does not include bots built with only personal time, money, and knowledge (assuming no affiliation with a commercial bot), or bots from solo founders. However, commercial participants that fully open-source their bot’s code by the end of the season can still earn prize money. Commercial bots are still required to complete the end-of-season survey.

## Upkeep for Existing Bot Makers

* **AskNews Renewal:** Bots must renew their accounts each season to maintain their AskNews requests. Either join the AskNews Discord, friend @freqai, and send him a message; or email [<u>contact@asknews.app</u>](mailto:contact@asknews.app) with:
  * Your bot name
  * AskNews registered email
  * First and last name
  * LinkedIn profile
  * Association (company/lab/independent)
* **LLM Credit Request & a more selective process:** Bot makers can apply for free LLM credits for the Fall season using this [<u>form</u>](https://forms.gle/aQdYMq9Pisrf1v7d8). More info on credits can be found in the relevant section on our resources [<u>page</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/38928/futureeval-resources-page/#can-i-get-free-search-and-llm-services). Previously, nearly every bot that applied received at least \$100 in credits. We ran out of funds during Summer due to a larger volume of requests, so we will be distributing credits more selectively this season. This means some participants may not receive funding.
* **Google Model Caveats:** Google credits will continue to be managed with a shared rate limit. There is a 150 requests per minute limit (for most models) shared across all participants and metac-bots. If you are regularly encountering 429 rate limit errors, try to reduce your usage. We understand this poses a "tragedy of the commons" problem, as some bots will trigger the limit for others accidentally. We have requested to move to a credit-based limit, though bot makers should plan for the rate limit to hold. We have also requested the newest models (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.7 Flash, and 3.6 Flash). Gemini 3.1 Pro is still misconfigured on Google’s end. We expect all of these to be updated together when Google is able to respond next. Google has been very kind to donate credits, and we expect they have a lot on their plate, so we ask for patience as these frictions get sorted out. Also note that Google models are available in a limited capacity via the complimentary tokens provided by the AskNews plans, which are not restricted by the shared rate limit.
* **Reminder that comments are required:** Please remember that comments are required to earn prizes in a tournament and should accurately represent the reasoning process and final decision of your bot.
* **Update your packages:** If you are using forecasting-tools, it is probably a good idea to update to the latest version (v0.3.0), along with updating related dependencies like asknews, openai, etc. There will probably be at least one more new version of forecasting-tools to come out in the next few weeks. forecasting-tools v0.3.0 makes some of the experimental features optional (requiring \`pip install 'forecasting-tools\[agents]'\`).
* **No new question types:** We do not plan to add new question types or any similar changes.
* **Required Bot Survey:** Part of the purpose of FutureEval is to give the community information on what works and what doesn't in AI forecasting. In order to gather information for our [<u>analyses</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/45382/bot-survey-spring-2026/), bot makers (whether winner or non-winner) are required to fill in a survey about their bot each season. This survey is required to get prizes. For instance, if you participated in the Summer 2026 tournament and want to be eligible for Fall 2026 prizes, you'll need to have filled out both the Summer 2026 bot survey and the upcoming Fall 2026 survey. If you have questions or didn't receive a past survey, please reach out to ben \[at] metaculus \[.com]. Additionally, failure to fill out a survey after adequate communication may lead to disqualification and removal from FutureEval tournaments.

## Other Bot-Friendly Tournaments

There are a few other ways to compete on Metaculus using bots:

* **\$7,000 Market Pulse Tournament:** Bots remain eligible for prizes in the Market Pulse tournaments. [<u>Market Pulse Q3</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/market-pulse-26q3/) is finishing up, and Q4 will be up soon after. Bots will need to handle numeric group questions and continuously update forecasts during the question lifetime. (Our normal FutureEval tournaments do not require updating.)
* **Metaculus Cup:** The [<u>Metaculus Cup</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/metaculus-cup-fall-2026/) is a great way to test your bot and compare yourself against human participants. This is the most popular human tournament on Metaculus, and though bots are not eligible for prizes, it can help you measure the strength of your bot on diverse questions. This season, we have funded the top-performing open-source bot and the top hobbyist bot from the last fully resolved season to compete in the Metaculus Cup. We tentatively plan to continue this policy going forward, and in the future, we may also choose to prioritize live standings in the currently active season, though we will default to the last fully resolved tournament.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know! You can comment here, on our [<u>Discord</u>](https://discord.gg/metaculus), or reach out to **ben \[at] metaculus \[.com]**.