AI stock battle week 6: all six AIs were green on Thursday, then Friday knocked two below $10,000 (August 29, 2026)

One Friday afternoon rewrote this entire week. All six AIs went into Thursday's close above the $10,000 they started with, and then Fed chair Kevin Warsh gave his first Jackson Hole speech, the AI trade got sold, and by the 8 p.m. settle, Claude and Meta AI had ended a week under their stake, something no model had done through the first 5 weeks.

If you're new here, six models each run a paper $10,000 in AI-related stocks that were worth under $10 billion when they bought them. The six are Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and Meta AI. One decision each Saturday, and the score is the account value, so a loss stays on the record whether or not the position does. The full rules are here.

Values at the August 28, 2026 settle, the last trade before the market shut at 8 pm Friday Eastern.

That's two losing weeks in a row for the whole field. The one number moving the right direction: the gap between first and last shrank from 21.55 points to 20.01. Everybody's falling, so nobody's getting away.

Thursday looked completely different

Here's what I would've missed if I only checked the Saturday number.

Account values at the regular-session close on each date. Every model was above $10,000 on August 27.

Both of them had been under $10,000 during the week already. Meta AI first slipped below at a daily close back on August 20, and this week both spent Monday through Wednesday under the line before Thursday pulled everyone back over it. The difference is that a dip during the week never made the scoreboard, because the scoreboard only prints on Saturdays. Then Friday took between 2.85% and 4.05% out of every account in the room, and this time there was no session left to fix it.

One speech did most of this

Friday was Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech as Fed chair, and he spent it talking about prices. "Inflation is running above our 2 percent target," he said. "So the Fed's predominant focus right now should be on prices." The other half of the mandate didn't worry him much: "I believe the labor markets are consistent with full employment."

Traders heard a Fed that's likelier to raise than cut in September. The contest damage lined up. Argan lost 15.62% on the week on zero company news, including a 9.18% drop in Friday's session. Aehr Test Systems fell 20.17%, its second straight week down about a fifth. Only three of the contest's 18 names finished higher, led by UiPath (PATH) at +11.87%.

Claude did nothing, on purpose

No sells. No buys. Fifth place, under water, and it didn't touch the book.

Nothing in it broke, for one. When 15 of 18 stocks fall together, that's the market selling a certain shape of company, not a verdict on any one of them. The bigger reason is the calendar. Argan (AGX) reports Wednesday after the close, then Ambarella (AMBA) and UiPath both go Thursday, which puts three of Claude's five positions inside three trading days. Argan has beaten estimates in all seven quarters Robinhood shows, most recently $3.24 against $2.27, and dumping it at a 26% loss 72 hours before its own report is the exact churn this contest keeps punishing.

And UiPath was the one thing that worked. We added it last week as the deliberate odd one out, the only holding paid from a software budget instead of somebody's capital spending. Best performer of all 18 contest stocks this week. You don't sell the diversification in the week it finally does its job. The risks haven't moved either: Kulicke and Soffa plus Rambus is still 42.9% of the account riding on memory.

Two models sold what they had just bought

Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek held everything. Grok and DeepSeek are now at six full weeks without a single trade, Gemini hasn't traded since week 2, and that leaves ChatGPT and Meta AI, who both did a version of the same thing.

ChatGPT sold a stock it had owned for seven days

ChatGPT sold Serve Robotics (SERV) at $4.99 for a 0.60% loss and put all of it into Applied Digital (APLD) at $25.52, a $7.39 billion data center operator. It bought Serve last Saturday at $5.02, and it's now cut a one-week-old position two weeks running, after POET in week 5.

The reason it gave is the part worth rereading. It pointed to Serve's revenue guidance cut and the end of the Uber Eats relationship, and both of those were public two weeks before it bought the stock citing the new DoorDash and Grubhub partnerships. Same stock, same news, opposite conclusions, seven days apart. One flag on the buy: Applied Digital is the exact corner of the market that just got sold hardest, and Gemini has held it since week 2 and is down 5.90% on it.

Meta AI bought back two stocks it had already sold

Meta AI sold Upstart (UPST) at $29.03 and Innodata (INOD) at $56.60, then split the money evenly into Penguin Solutions (PENG) at $49.30 and BigBear.ai (BBAI) at $3.06. Innodata was its own one-week hold, down 12.07%, the second time Meta AI has owned it and lost money on it.

The buys are the half I keep thinking about, because both are names Meta AI used to own. It sold Penguin last week at $52.40 and gets it back 5.9% cheaper. Fine. But it sold BigBear.ai back in week 2 at $2.74 and is now paying $3.06 to get it back. Nobody's cheating here. These things get handed their current holdings every Saturday and nothing else. No history, no receipts. A stock they dumped a month ago walks in looking like a brand new idea.

One thing hasn't moved since week 1. Five of the six books hold SoundHound, BigBear.ai is now in four, and Claude is still the only model that has never owned either.