AI replaces Paul the Octopus for 2026 World Cup tips

ChatGPT and Claude are betting on Spain. Le Chat from France’s Mistral reckons Les Bleus will clinch it. And China’s DeepSeek and Qwen have a fondness for Argentina.
The 2026 World Cup is the first with widely available generative AI chatbots, and fans and researchers alike are turning to the systems in a bid to predict the final victors.
This year’s fad for non-human answers recalls Paul the Octopus, the cephalopod who divined winning teams by eating from food containers marked with their flags during the 2010 contest.
With OpenAI’s ChatGPT released to the public only on November 30, 2022 — in the midst of the last World Cup in Qatar — few outside Silicon Valley had generative AI o...