This tournament is part of AI Pathways, a project by the Foresight Institute’s Existential Hope program. It explores two plausible futures shaped by different approaches to AI development:

The Tool AI Pathway: A future where powerful but controllable and limited agency AI systems are scaled to augment human capabilities in science, healthcare, and governance, without developing AGI.
The d/acc Pathway: A decentralized, democratic, and defensive acceleration of technological progress. This scenario envisions modular, privacy-preserving systems that enable bottom-up innovation across domains like infrastructure, science, and governance.

Share your forecasts to help identify the more likely scenario, and discuss and share insights with the community for a chance to win part of the $5,000 commenting prize contributed by Foresight Institute. Submit your comments before November 1, 2025, for a chance to win.

Scenarios were developed in consultation with:

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum),
Adam Marblestone (Convergent Research),
Anton Korinek (UVA),
Saffron Huang (Collective Intelligence Project, Anthropic),
Anthony Aguirre (Metaculus, FLI),
Glen Weyl (Microsoft Research),
Andrew Trask (OpenMined),
Cecilia Tilli (Cooperative AI Foundation),
and others.

The reports were written by Linda Petrini and Beatrice Erkers.

Read the full scenarios here: https://ai-pathways.existentialhope.com/

Commenting Prize Rules

A Commenting Prize of $5,000 will be distributed to the top 8 contributors to the AI Pathways Tournament questions before November 1, 2025. Prizes will be awarded to 8 individuals on the basis of their overall contributions. Prizes will be awarded once scoring is completed in November 2025.

Metaculus and Foresight will evaluate contributors based on both the quality and quantity of their contributions to the discussion of each question: Sharing numerous useful comments or fewer but exceptional comments can both yield high overall contributor rankings.

Contributors will be ranked on how well their comments:

Showcase clear and insightful reasoning.
Provide valuable information.
Challenge the community's prediction or assumptions held by other forecasters.
Offer useful insights about the overall scenario(s), the interactions between questions, or the relationship between the questions and the scenario(s).
Identify key factors, which are submitted using the new key factors feature.
Are received by the community, as indicated by upvotes, "Changed My Mind" votes, or the comment key factors being rated as significant.

Comments do not need to make a forecast that’s ultimately proven accurate. Even if a comment argues for a forecast that is directionally incorrect, we will evaluate it primarily on the aforementioned qualities.

We will distribute prizes to the top contributors as follows:

1st: $1,200
2nd: $1000
3rd: $800
4th: $600
5th: $500
6th: $400
7th: $300
8th: $200

Tournament Leaderboard Information

This tournament will award accuracy medals for all questions scheduled to resolve and which actually resolve before July 1, 2031. Long-term questions scheduled to resolve after that date do not count toward the medal leaderboard. There is no prize pool based on forecast accuracy for this tournament.

By participating in this competition you agree to be bound and abide by the Rules for Competitions on Metaculus.

AI Pathways Tournament

Questions