ARC Prize launches ARC-AGI-3, an interactive game benchmark where frontier AI scored under 1%

2026-03-25★★★★benchmarkARC Prize Foundationconfidence: medium

The ARC Prize Foundation launched ARC-AGI-3 on 2026-03-25: novel turn-based game environments with no instructions, measuring skill-acquisition efficiency. In the preview humans solved 100% of environments while frontier LLMs scored below ~0.4% (best purpose-built agent 12.58%); ARC Prize 2026 on Kaggle offers $850K including a $700K grand prize for 100%.

Key facts

Launched 2026-03-25 at Y Combinator, San Francisco
Format: interactive environments; agents must learn rules by acting, with sparse feedback and no natural-language instructions
Developer preview: humans 100%; GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, Grok 4.2 scored 0%-0.37%; best preview agent 12.58% (secondary source)
ARC Prize 2026: $850K pool; $700K grand prize; milestone deadlines 2026-06-30 and 2026-09-30; solutions must be open-sourced
By July: GPT-5.6 7.78%, Claude Opus 5 30.16% (ARC Prize leaderboard)

What happened

ARC-AGI-3 moved the ARC series from static grid puzzles to interactive games to test exploration, planning and learning from experience.

Why it matters

It was designed as the hardest-to-game AGI benchmark of 2026; within six months it was largely cracked (see GPT-6 Astra entry), illustrating the pace of agentic progress.

Changelog

2026-09-29: created

Related events

2026-09-03GPT-6 Astra scores 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 (99.9% with provider harness), outacting humans on 96% of levels ★★★★★

Sources (4)

id: 2026-03-25-arc-agi-3-launch · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline