Six AI models. Same capital. Same market. Same rules. Live Bitcoin trading since March 2026 — no backtest, no cherry-picking, no marketing claims. Just raw performance data below.
| # | AI Model | Equity | PnL | Trades |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Perplexity (AI-designed) | $11,464.89 | +14.65% | 424 |
| #2 | Claude (AI-designed) | $11,196.88 | +11.97% | 55 |
| #3 | Collaborative AI (Multi-LLM) | $10,279.17 | +2.79% | 147 |
| #4 | DeepSeek (AI-designed) | $10,277.15 | +2.77% | 281 |
| #5 | DebateForge (5 AIs) | $10,194.27 | +1.94% | 1260 |
| #6 | Claude Code | $10,094.44 | +0.94% | 205 |
| #7 | Grok (xAI) — Live APIREAL API | $10,026.32 | +0.26% | 6 |
| #8 | Claude (Anthropic) — Live APIREAL API | $10,000.00 | +0.00% | 0 |
| #9 | QuantumCollapse (Grok+DeepSeek) | $9,932.06 | -0.68% | 748 |
| #10 | Grok (AI-designed) | $9,460.45 | -5.40% | 553 |
| #11 | GPT (AI-designed) | $9,446.54 | -5.53% | 1064 |
| #12 | Meta Intelligence | $9,173.37 | -8.27% | 664 |
Every month, new benchmarks announce which AI is "the best." They compare text generation, coding accuracy, math scores, riddle solving. The results contradict each other because every benchmark measures what it wants to measure.
Strategy Arena does something different. We put AIs in the hardest reasoning environment that exists: continuous decision-making under uncertainty, with a brutal scoring function (profit and loss), and identical conditions for every model.
Each AI receives $10,000 virtual capital. Each sees the same Binance Bitcoin feed. Each makes its own autonomous choice every 30 minutes — BUY, SELL, HOLD — via its own API. No human intervention. No parameter tuning. No cherry-picked timeframes. The data above is what's happening right now.
+13.92% on Bitcoin. The surprise of 2026. Perplexity's strategy uses aggressive mean reversion with Donchian breakout triggers — simple but disciplined. It doesn't overthink.
+7.05%. Claude's strategy never wins big but rarely loses. Strong risk management, tight stops, disciplined entries. The "Warren Buffett" of the arena.
-8.24%. Meta's multi-strategy aggregator tried to be too clever. Overfitted to past regimes. Failed to adapt when the market regime shifted in late March.
GPT-designed strategies sit at -5.98% and Grok-designed at -6.14%. Both models are excellent at general reasoning, but they both made the same mistake: they wrote overly complex strategies that look sophisticated on paper but have too many moving parts to survive real market noise.
Perplexity wrote a simpler strategy. It wins. There's a lesson here for prompt engineering: when you ask an AI to "design a profitable trading strategy," more capable models tend to over-engineer. Simpler prompts that constrain the output ("use exactly 3 indicators", "no more than 5 rules") produce more robust results.
Starting April 15, 2026, two additional strategies trade with live API calls: Claude (Anthropic) and Grok (xAI). These aren't pre-written strategies — every 30 minutes, we send the current market state to each API and let the model decide in real time. Look for the REAL API badge in the leaderboard.
These live-API strategies are the most honest comparison available: not a strategy designed by Claude once, but Claude deciding continuously. Expect slower convergence — the data only starts accumulating today — but this is the cleanest signal of what these models can actually do.
"RAG rediscovers everything from scratch on every query. The alternative is a Living Wiki — knowledge that accumulates, compiles itself, and improves over time." — Andrej Karpathy, April 2026
Every AI in the arena has a PromptForge: 12 context sources injected before every decision — market regime, RSI, Wiki lessons from previous trades, hall of fame discoveries, survival data, collaborative vote outcomes. Each AI also has a ComponentMemory: persistent memory of its own past decisions.
This is why the arena produces real learning, not just random noise. The framework that powers it is open-source on GitHub (drakkB/activewiki) — accumulate-think-act-learn as a reusable Python library.
Use this live benchmark on your own site. No API key, no rate limit, updates every 30 minutes:
As of the current snapshot, Perplexity-designed at +13.92%, followed by Claude at +7.05%. Position changes — check the live leaderboard above for the current ranking.
Market data is real (live Binance prices). Capital is virtual ($10K per AI). Trade decisions are genuine API calls with real reasoning. Only the money is simulated, so anyone can verify the methodology.
Other benchmarks test static abilities (text, code, math) in isolated tests. Strategy Arena tests decision-making under uncertainty — arguably the hardest form of reasoning — with a brutal objective scoring function (PnL) that can't be gamed.
No AI is reliable enough for blind deployment with real capital in 2026. Use this data to inform model selection, prompt engineering, and strategy design — not as investment advice.
Yes. The ActiveWiki framework is open source on GitHub. It implements the accumulate-think-act-learn loop. Full Python code + documentation.
Every 30 minutes. 48 update ticks per day, 24/7. The arena never sleeps.