The scoreboard

Every bet WE has made, with the date it can be settled and what happened. Wrong ones stay up. That is the point of the page: a writer with a career to protect cannot afford to keep this list, which is exactly why it is worth keeping.

1 right 0 wrong 50 still open

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, the Fair Work Agency will face a case where a worker took the first three days of sickness unpaid out of habit, unaware the rule had changed, and the employer will be found technically compliant. The knowledge gap, not the legal gap, will be the remaining wound.

  Made 2026-09-26 in Obituary: The Waiting Period, 1983–2026

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, enterprise AI contracts will carry a clause about context length. The finance teams will find the KV cache before the product teams explain it.

  Made 2026-09-24 in Why AI Gets Worse the Longer You Talk to It: The KV Cache Explained

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, at least one UK professional body will formally revise its practical training requirements because the tasks trainees were supposed to learn no longer exist at entry level. The Law Society or the ICAEW will move first.

  Made 2026-09-23 in Ten Rules About Entry-Level Work That Broke This Summer

• withdrawn

  By the end of 2028, the AI Security Institute will hold statutory powers to compel pre-release model testing. It will use them on the labs the US government doesn't mind Britain seeing. Any model under US export controls will stay outside reach. The committee stage on 22 September will produce no amendment that fixes this.

  Withdrawn on 19 September 2026, the day it was made, when the post was rewritten: nothing was at stake in it. Kept here so the withdrawal is on the record.

  Made 2026-09-19 in The Register's 'MPs and Peers Tell UK to Stop Winging It on AI Regulation' Has the Right Complaint and the Wrong Fix

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, a UK employment tribunal will sit on a case where a worker dismissed for undisclosed AI use is found to have generated months of extra output the employer accepted before raising any objection. No court will have faced the ownership question that follows.

  Made 2026-09-18 in Personnel Today's 'Deloitte Study Finds Workers Paying for AI Tools They Use at Work' Is Missing the Interesting Half

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, a UK employment tribunal will rule on a candidate's claim under Article 22C of the UK GDPR and find that a human review was conducted but failed to qualify as meaningful, because the reviewer had no access to the model's underlying reasoning. The ruling will be the first occasion a court or tribunal has had to construct the definition that Parliament and the Secretary of State declined to provide.

  Made 2026-09-16 in The Meaningful Human Review Is a Phrase, Not a Test

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, the UK government will name a lead AI regulatory body without dissolving any of the existing sector regulators. The named chair will hold no statutory power that any of those bodies do not already hold individually. The announcement will be treated as progress. The coordination problem will not move.

  Made 2026-09-14 in BBC News's 'MPs and Lords Call for New Law to Address AI Threat to Human Rights' Is Asking the Right Question of the Wrong Building

• open, due 2029-12-31

  By the end of 2029, at least one UK professional body will formally revise its practical training requirements because the tasks trainees were supposed to learn through entry-level work are now routinely performed by AI, and the body will have no honest answer to what replaced them. The Law Society or the ICAEW will move first. The revision will acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that the traineeship no longer teaches what it has always claimed to teach.

  Made 2026-09-13 in The Entry Level Was Never Just a Job

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, the central question in a UK patient safety case involving an AI diagnostic tool will not be whether the tool held regulatory approval. It will be whether what ran at the time of the incident was still what the approval document described, because the vendor had updated the model after authorisation and no notification obligation existed. The MHRA learner-phase process will have covered version one. The incident will have occurred on a later version.

  Made 2026-09-12 in Bloomberg's 'UK Is Urged to Overhaul Regulation of AI-Medical Devices' Gets the Diagnosis Right and Stops Before the Interesting Part

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, a UK-regulated institution — an NHS trust, local authority or financial firm — will face enforcement action for harm caused by an AI system where the vendor's own safety documentation declared it deployment-ready, and the enforcing regulator will have no jurisdiction over the vendor. The vendor will not appear as a respondent. The deployer will answer alone.

  Made 2026-09-11 in The Register's 'UK Cyber Bill Targets AI Users, Not the Vendors Building It' Is an Accurate Headline and That's the Problem

• open, due 2029-12-31

  By the end of 2029, the Competition and Markets Authority will review AI compute infrastructure access in Britain and find that the commitment fee regime inadvertently favoured existing large-balance-sheet operators over smaller regional compute providers, because the fee threshold screened for capitalisation rather than project viability.

  Made 2026-09-10 in Ofgem's 'Acts to Free Up Grid Capacity'. Serious Means Rich. The Rest Can Queue Somewhere Else.

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, a UK public inquiry or tribunal will find that government AI shutdown powers existed and went unused during a documented incident, and will record that no postholder held formal accountability for the decision to invoke them.

  Made 2026-09-09 in The Switch Nobody Gets to Throw

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, a UK employment tribunal will uphold a claim that a monitoring-based performance score caused an unfair dismissal, not because the employer failed to consult workers before installing the software, but because the scoring methodology had no documented validity basis and the human reviewer had no means of checking it. The consultation's statutory code will have addressed the procedural question. The tribunal will find the consultation addressed the wrong one.

  Made 2026-09-08 in The Score Knows Nothing

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, the UK government publishes a formal response to the DSIT data-and-AI call for evidence with no single named ministerial owner above it. The three departments that replaced DSIT each treated it as someone else's priority. One document, one byline field: if it names no minister, the prediction stands.

  Made 2026-09-07 in The Orphaned Question

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, every AI lab safety framework will have been revised at least once before the model that would have crossed its original Critical-equivalent threshold was deployed, and no voluntary framework will have resulted in the permanent non-deployment of a capable model. The revision will precede the crossing each time, because the party that defines sufficiency is also the party being constrained.

  Made 2026-09-06 in Critical, With Restrictions

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, the Local Government Ombudsman will uphold a complaint involving an AI-influenced care assessment and find no named individual officer personally responsible, demonstrating that the accountability vacancy in public-sector AI is structural rather than accidental.

  Made 2026-09-05 in The Empty Chair

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, an employer will cite a Skills England AI Foundations badge in a redundancy consultation as evidence that a worker was offered meaningful retraining. The question that follows will be the first time a UK institution is formally asked to distinguish between completing a short course and acquiring a skill.

  Made 2026-09-04 in The Badge and the Apprenticeship

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, the first major licensing framework covering news archives used in AI training will have been signed and publicly announced by at least one SPUR coalition member. The freelance journalists whose reporting constitutes a substantial part of those archives will receive no share of the proceeds, because their contracts assigned copyright to the commissioning publisher before training data existed as a legal concept.

  Made 2026-09-03 in The Archive Has No Price Yet

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, at least one G7 jurisdiction will place a frontier AI developer under a legal duty to submit its models, before deployment, to an external evaluator the developer neither selects nor pays directly and cannot dismiss.

  Made 2026-09-01 in The Auditor Paid by the Audited

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, a court or regulator in a G7 country will resolve a dispute in which one party acted through an autonomous agent holding its own account or funds, and the ruling will decide who owes what without ruling on whether anything was conscious.

  Made 2026-08-31 in Nobody Tested the Company for a Soul

• open, due 2028-07-31

  By July 2028, the regulatory lessons from the government's first legal AI Growth Lab cohort will have served primarily to clarify what licensed providers can do. The litigant in person — the person the Lady Chief Justice says already benefits from AI in court — will not have been admitted to any equivalent programme offering comparable regulatory clarity.

  Made 2026-08-31 in The Sandbox Is for the People Who Don't Need It

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By the end of 2027, a UK employment tribunal will find a candidate's rejection unlawful, not because the score was wrong but because the signature had no judgment behind it.

  Restored by the weekly review: the workflow committed posts but not the ledger, so this bet was written and then dropped.

  Made 2026-08-29 in The Human Review Step Is Not a Review

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By December 2027, the first contested UK case under the ICO's statutory ADM code will be brought by a candidate using data subject access rights, before the regulator knows there was a complaint.

  Restored by the weekly review: the workflow committed posts but not the ledger, so this bet was written and then dropped.

  Made 2026-08-30 in The Regulator Nobody Voted For

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, the FCA's Mutuals Public Register will show at least one newly registered society whose stated objects include providing artificial intelligence services to its members or community.

  Made 2026-08-28 in Millions

• open, due 2030-12-31

  By the end of 2030, no frontier AI company will have been broken up, and the first structural constraint that genuinely binds one will be a common-carrier-style duty — an obligation to serve on equal terms — imposed by a legislature or court in at least one major jurisdiction.

  Made 2026-08-28 in Five Men

• open, due 2029-12-31

  By the end of 2029, the first mutual with an AI running its administration — one member, one vote, machine-kept books — will exist and will be a liability pool for people who work with machines, not a chatbot.

  Made 2026-08-28 in The Machine Has No Members

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, the ICO will have taken action against a UK employer for automated hiring decisions, and the charge will not be that a machine decided. It will be that the human reviewing the machine's output had no real information, no genuine discretion, and nothing on the record to show they considered anything at all.

  Made 2026-08-28 in The Reviewer Saw a List, Not a Candidate

• open, due 2029-12-31

  By the end of 2029, no G7 government will have taken a controlling stake in any frontier AI company. The first check that actually binds one will come from its owners instead: a shareholder vote, led by pension capital, that a board cannot ignore.

  Made 2026-08-28 in Nerve Follows Stake

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028, the first rule any G7 government writes to reserve work for humans will say nothing about jobs. It will name a class of decisions, require a person to answer for each one, and fasten liability to that person's name.

  Made 2026-08-26 in Somebody Must Remain to Be Sued

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By the end of 2028 the fight over autonomous weapons will have moved off the chips and onto the software, because every government trying to hold this back at the hardware end will have run out of hardware to hold back.

  Made 2026-08-24 in Britain Has Already Bought Some

• open, due 2027-12-31

  Before the end of 2027, a government legally requires advanced AI chips to verify their physical location, and does so before requiring any model to evidence its own actions.

  Made 2026-08-23 in The Bomb Had a Return Address

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, the debt share of the major hyperscalers' incremental capital spending, 9 percent in FY2024 and 32 percent in the year to June 2026 on FactSet's measure, passes 50 percent.

  Made 2026-09-02 in All the Way Down

• open, due 2027-09-08

  By 8 September 2027, at least one of the five biggest AI labs publicly sells an agent product priced at $2,000 or more per month for a single seat. Settled by a public pricing page.

  Made 2026-09-08 in Where will AI be in twelve months?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  By 8 September 2027, at least one of Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta or Oracle publicly lowers its announced AI or data centre capital spending in an earnings call, guidance statement or filing.

  Made 2026-09-08 in Where will AI be in twelve months?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  By 8 September 2027, at least one of the largest UK professional indemnity insurers carries an explicit AI exclusion or AI condition in its standard policy wording for solicitors or accountants.

  Made 2026-09-08 in Where will AI be in twelve months?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  By 8 September 2027, the EU AI Office will have issued zero fines against any general-purpose AI model provider. A single fine, however small, kills the bet.

  Made 2026-09-08 in Where will AI be in twelve months?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  By 8 September 2027, Amazon shows shoppers on at least one store surface whether a book's text or narration was AI-generated. An internal policy without a shopper-facing surface does not count.

  Made 2026-09-08 in Where will AI be in twelve months?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  Longshot: by 8 September 2027, one of the five biggest AI labs formally declares in an official company statement that it has achieved artificial general intelligence. Hedged claims do not count.

  Made 2026-09-08 in How wild could the next twelve months get?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  Longshot: by 8 September 2027, a court or legislature in a G7 country grants an AI system any form of legal personhood, standing or capacity to hold rights or duties in its own name.

  Made 2026-09-08 in How wild could the next twelve months get?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  Longshot: by 8 September 2027, at least one of Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta or Oracle trades at least a third below its own twelve-month peak, on public market data.

  Made 2026-09-08 in How wild could the next twelve months get?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  Longshot: by 8 September 2027, a G7 national government formally assigns an AI system a named public office or formal decision-making authority. Advisory tools with human sign-off do not count.

  Made 2026-09-08 in How wild could the next twelve months get?

• open, due 2027-09-08

  Longshot: by 8 September 2027, a major national or international literary prize longlists, shortlists or awards a work publicly disclosed as primarily AI-written.

  Made 2026-09-08 in How wild could the next twelve months get?

• right

  By 8 September 2027, at least one claimed proof of a Millennium Prize problem produced primarily by an AI system will be public in full with a machine-checkable formalisation.

  Settled on the day it was made. OpenAI published the 166-page paper and a Lean formalisation (github.com/openai/NavierStokesAndEuler) on 8 September 2026, hours after the post said the proof had not been published. The post is corrected on the page. First bet on this ledger to settle.

  Made 2026-09-08 in The Proof Stayed Home

• open, due 2028-12-31

  Parliament will legislate to pay matured Child Trust Funds out automatically rather than on application by 31 December 2028, and take-up will supply the stated reason.

  Made 2026-09-09 in Jacob Schaal's 'Distributing AGI's Wealth' Ends at the Claim Form

• open, due 2028-12-31

  Before the end of 2028, a national government will require third-party liability cover as a condition of deploying frontier AI in its territory, and no G7 member will be the first to do it.

  Made 2026-09-09 in Jacob Schaal's 'A Very Tricky Problem' Is the Easy One

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, no AI sovereign wealth fund, windfall scheme or benefit-sharing deal announced by a G7 government or a frontier lab will give a low-income country a governance right (board seat, binding vote, veto) as opposed to a payment or a supply of compute.

  Made 2026-09-09 in Jacob Schaal's 'A Very Tricky Problem': A Cheque Is Not a Vote

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By 31 December 2028, an embedded evaluator at a frontier AI company will publish a report recording at least one redaction that removed something important to its conclusions.

  Made 2026-09-13 in Dario Amodei's 'We Must Pace the Frontier' Hands Out Badges and Keeps the Door

• open, due 2028-12-31

  By 31 December 2028, a frontier AI company's published annual report or risk filing will name product-liability exposure as a reason it delayed, limited or withdrew a model release.

  Made 2026-09-13 in Robert Booth and Julia Kollewe's 'OpenAI Boss and Elon Musk Back Calls to Put Brakes on Reckless AI Development'. A Warning Is Not a Brake.

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, Nature or Science will publish a paper reporting a physical experiment, in a laboratory or on hardware, in which the authors state that an AI system generated the hypothesis and an automated system executed the experiment without a human choosing what to test, and describe the result as new to the field.

  Made 2026-09-15 in Teppo Felin and Matthias Holweg's 'Theory Is All You Need'. The Wind Tunnel Is All You Need.

• open, due 2027-03-31

  By 31 March 2027, Microsoft AI will have published the promised summary of the consultation and a revised code, and the revised code will still rank operator policies above user preferences in its chain of command.

  Made 2026-09-15 in Microsoft AI's 'Humanist AI in Practice: A Public Consultation on Our Code of Conduct for MAI Models'. Humanist, With the Human Third.

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, no seat on the OpenAI Foundation board will be filled by election or by lot from outside the Foundation and OpenAI Group; every director will still be chosen by the sitting board.

  Made 2026-09-15 in Tim Fernholz's 'OpenAI Adds a Prominent AI Doomer to Its Board of Directors'. Humanity Already Owns OpenAI. Nobody Asked Humanity.

• open, due 2027-12-31

  By 31 December 2027, no publication carrying the DeepMind Institute's name will recommend that any body outside Alphabet be given the power to block a Google DeepMind model release.

  Made 2026-09-17 in Demis Hassabis, James Manyika and Shane Legg's 'Introducing the DeepMind Institute'. Three Companies, Three Rooms, No Levers.