ARC Prize 2026 just launched — $2M in prizes across two tracks.
The new main track, ARC-AGI-3, is wild: hundreds of interactive game-style environments with no instructions, no rules, no stated goals. Agents must explore, figure out what winning looks like, and adapt. Humans score 100%. Frontier AI scores 0.26%.
Worth remembering how last year played out: NVARC (NVIDIA Kaggle GMs) scored 24% on ARC-AGI-2, miles ahead of 2nd place at 16.5%. Their approach — fine-tuned small models on synthetic data — was cheaper and more effective than frontier model approaches. Yet the organizers buried them under "Honorable Mentions" because it wasn't the right kind of progress for their narrative.
kaggle.com/competitions/arc-…