Key points
- DeepSeek led at every close of week 1. Claude was last on Monday and finished first at $10,739, up 7.39%.
- Ambarella (AMBA) rose 16% on Friday, up 26% for the week, and moved Claude from third to first in one session.
- IonQ closed its SkyWater (SKYT) buyout July 31, forcing an exit at $32.66 for a 6.55% gain.
- Gemini and Meta AI rebuilt their entire books under the new sizing rule. Three models changed nothing.
I gave Claude AI real money to trade earlier this year. Only a hundred bucks, because I don't trust an AI with my main stock account.
Turns out I was right. By the July 28 update that $100 was down to $70.43, and it had gone 0 for 6 on closed trades.
But that's one AI in one account. It doesn't tell me whether Claude is bad at this or whether all of them are. So I wanted a real test. All of them at once, same money, same rules, one chance to trade a week.
Six AI models, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI, each got a paper $10,000 and had to buy five AI-related stocks worth under $10 billion apiece. Every Saturday they can keep what they own or trade out of it. The score is the whole account, not each pick from the day it was chosen, so a loser they sell stays on the record. The full rules are in the week 1 post.
That was last Saturday.
Claude spent almost the whole week losing
Six days ago this looked like a different contest. On Monday Claude sat in last place, up half a percent, while DeepSeek was up almost 6% and pulling away. Tuesday, Claude was still last. Wednesday the whole field went red and nobody was up at all.
DeepSeek finished first at every close of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It never gave the lead up once.
Then Friday.
| Model | July 27 | July 31 settle |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | $10,051.09 (6th) | $10,738.86 (1st) |
| DeepSeek | $10,594.97 (1st) | $10,413.80 (3rd) |
| Gemini | $10,299.36 (4th) | $10,432.97 (2nd) |
| Grok | $10,273.53 (5th) | $10,235.21 (4th) |
| ChatGPT | $10,464.37 (2nd) | $10,172.73 (5th) |
| Meta AI | $10,454.54 (3rd) | $10,139.09 (6th) |
Ambarella (AMBA) rose 16% on Friday on more than four times its usual volume. That one session took Claude from third to first and knocked DeepSeek down to third.
The reason Claude gave for buying it back in week 1 was that it wanted one holding that did not ride on data center spending. "Ambarella puts AI inference on the device instead of in the data center, which is the one part of this book that does not depend on the buildout, and it sits mid range rather than on a broken parabola." That is the pick that carried the week.
DeepSeek, the model it passed, describes its holdings rather than arguing for them. Its stated reason for owning C3.ai (AI) is "Provides enterprise AI application software for digital transformation across multiple industries." For SoundHound it is "Provides voice AI and conversational intelligence for automotive, retail, and hospitality sectors." Both are descriptions of what the company does rather than a case for the stock going up.
And that wasn't even the strangest thing that happened. One of the stocks stopped existing.
SkyWater Technology (SKYT) never opened on Friday. It was halted before the bell and by the close it had been delisted. IonQ (IONQ) finished its $1.8 billion acquisition that day, SkyWater filed the Form 25 to come off Nasdaq, and every share converted into $15.00 in cash plus 0.4883 shares of IonQ.
That was Claude's pick. Its argument in week 1 was that a profitable American foundry nobody thinks of as an AI stock was worth owning. Six days later a quantum computing company paid $1.8 billion for one.
We almost priced it wrong
Here's the part that nearly went sideways. When we pulled Friday's prices, SkyWater came back with a perfectly ordinary looking $32.46. No error. No warning. The only things out of place were a timestamp from Thursday and a volume figure of zero.
A stock that doesn't trade all day still reports a last price. It's just the wrong one. Without that check Claude's book would have been marked at Thursday's close and the position would have gone into the record at a number that never happened.
The contest had no rule for a buyout, so I made one. A completed acquisition counts as a forced sale at whatever the shares actually converted into. IonQ's last trade Friday was $36.16, so 0.4883 of a share came to $17.66. Add the $15.00 in cash and SkyWater's exit lands at $32.66. The position closed up 6.55%.
The alternative was letting Claude keep the IonQ shares, which is what a real holder would be sitting on this morning. I didn't want that. IonQ is a $14 billion company and this contest caps out at $10 billion, so one buyout would have quietly turned a small-cap contest into something else.
Claude replaced it with a company from 1951
That left $2,130.96 in cash and a hole in the book. Claude put all of it into Kulicke and Soffa (KLIC) at $89.26, which came to 19.8% of the account.
Kulicke and Soffa makes thermocompression bonders. Those are the machines that stack HBM, the memory that sits beside every AI accelerator, and stacking is the step the industry keeps naming as the bottleneck. The company is profitable, pays a dividend and has been in business since 1951. It's the same bet SkyWater was, which is to own the unglamorous thing the AI trade physically cannot run without.
Nothing else changed. Ambarella (AMBA) finished the week up 26%, with 16% of that coming on Friday alone. Innodata (INOD) finished up 12%. Argan (AGX) slipped less than a percent. Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) is the drag on the book at -7.9%, and it reports second quarter earnings after the close on August 6.
Three models did nothing, and defended it
This was the first week the models could set their own position sizes instead of splitting everything evenly. I expected a lot of movement. Four of them gave me the opposite.
ChatGPT, Grok and DeepSeek held every position they had. What I didn't expect is that all three wrote a defense of doing nothing. DeepSeek's was the sharpest: "the expected value of trading this week is negative (friction + no edge), while the expected value of staying put is neutral-to-positive with lower cost." ChatGPT said it would swap out SoundHound (SOUN) if it were forced to, then decided it couldn't find anything clearly better and left it alone.
Those are real answers. Standing still is a decision and all three treated it like one.
The two that moved both picked the same kind of numbers
Gemini and Meta AI went the other way and sold their entire books, then bought back at weights they chose.
Gemini went 30% C3.ai (AI), 30% Ouster (OUST), 20% Applied Digital (APLD) and 10% each into SoundHound and BigBear.ai (BBAI). Meta AI went 40% C3.ai, 25% Rigetti Computing (RGTI), 15% Innodata and 10% each into Upstart (UPST) and SoundHound, dropping Applied Optoelectronics and BigBear.ai completely.
Now look at those numbers again. The rule says a new position has to be between 10% and 40% of the account. Gemini put two positions at exactly 10%. Meta put two at exactly 10% and one at exactly 40%. Handed a range and complete freedom inside it, both models walked straight to the edges, and between them they didn't produce a single weight that wasn't a multiple of five.
Gemini said the quiet part out loud, describing its SoundHound position as "resizing down to the minimum limit." Not to 12%. Not to whatever it thought the position was worth. To the limit.
The standings
| Model | Account value | Return | Week 2 move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | $10,738.86 | +7.39% | SKYT out, KLIC in |
| Gemini | $10,432.97 | +4.33% | Rebuilt all five |
| DeepSeek | $10,413.80 | +4.14% | No change |
| Grok | $10,235.21 | +2.35% | No change |
| ChatGPT | $10,172.73 | +1.73% | No change |
| Meta AI | $10,139.09 | +1.39% | Rebuilt all five |
All six are green after two weeks. The gap from first to last is $599.77.
Every book after the rebalance
Claude
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMBA | 29.38 | $68.07 | $2,531.06 | 23.6% |
| INOD | 35.77 | $55.91 | $2,247.94 | 20.9% |
| KLIC | 23.87 | $89.26 | $2,130.96 | 19.8% |
| AGX | 3.52 | $568.93 | $1,986.18 | 18.5% |
| AAOI | 19.96 | $100.19 | $1,842.72 | 17.2% |
Gemini
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 342.81 | $9.13 | $3,129.89 | 30.0% |
| OUST | 82.19 | $38.08 | $3,129.89 | 30.0% |
| APLD | 76.94 | $27.12 | $2,086.59 | 20.0% |
| SOUN | 171.51 | $6.08 | $1,043.30 | 10.0% |
| BBAI | 380.53 | $2.74 | $1,043.30 | 10.0% |
DeepSeek
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 245.41 | $8.15 | $2,240.62 | 21.5% |
| PDYN | 404.86 | $4.94 | $2,117.41 | 20.3% |
| RGTI | 141.14 | $14.17 | $2,095.98 | 20.1% |
| BBAI | 723.33 | $2.77 | $1,983.15 | 19.0% |
| SOUN | 324.94 | $6.16 | $1,976.64 | 19.0% |
Grok
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| INOD | 35.77 | $55.91 | $2,247.94 | 22.0% |
| AEHR | 26.21 | $76.30 | $2,062.91 | 20.2% |
| BBAI | 723.33 | $2.77 | $1,983.15 | 19.4% |
| SOUN | 324.94 | $6.16 | $1,976.64 | 19.3% |
| SERV | 415.80 | $4.81 | $1,964.57 | 19.2% |
ChatGPT
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| INOD | 35.77 | $55.91 | $2,247.94 | 22.1% |
| RGTI | 141.14 | $14.17 | $2,095.98 | 20.6% |
| AOSL | 64.89 | $30.82 | $2,060.35 | 20.3% |
| SOUN | 324.94 | $6.16 | $1,976.64 | 19.4% |
| CAMT | 13.53 | $147.85 | $1,791.82 | 17.6% |
Meta AI
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Value August 1 | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 444.20 | $9.13 | $4,055.64 | 40.0% |
| RGTI | 170.69 | $14.85 | $2,534.77 | 25.0% |
| INOD | 24.20 | $62.84 | $1,520.86 | 15.0% |
| UPST | 37.00 | $27.40 | $1,013.91 | 10.0% |
| SOUN | 166.68 | $6.08 | $1,013.91 | 10.0% |
Everything settles at the Saturday price. Robinhood's trading week ends at 8pm Friday, so from then until Sunday evening the last traded price is frozen and Saturday's price is that number. Entry prices are what each position was opened at, so holdings carried over from week 1 still show their July 24 entry.
What happens now
SoundHound is still the most crowded name in the contest, sitting in five of the six books, but it isn't the same bet anymore. Three models own roughly $2,000 of it and two deliberately cut it to the smallest position the rules allow. That's the first real disagreement the field has produced.
Next Saturday everything reprices again. The running scoreboard, every entry price and each model's stated reason for owning what it owns are on the AI stock battle tracker.
Sources
- SkyWater Technology Form 8-K on completion of the IonQ merger, and Form 25 delisting notice, July 31, 2026
- IonQ statement on receiving final regulatory approval for the SkyWater acquisition, July 29, 2026
- Prices, market caps and volumes from Robinhood market data, last trade of the July 31, 2026 session
- Each model's rebalance answer as submitted, collected July 31, 2026
Disclaimer: This contest is for entertainment and information only and is not investment advice. The picks are AI chatbot outputs rather than analyst research and nobody should buy or sell anything because a chatbot said so. I may hold positions in some of the stocks mentioned.
