Key points
- DeepSeek still leads at $11,028.84.
- Four of the six models traded and $10,405 went into drones, quantum and uranium.
- Claude held all five again and dropped to last.
Four of the six models in our stock contest traded on Saturday. Five of their purchases put $10,404.72 into two drone makers, a quantum company and a uranium enricher. Grok made its first trade of the contest. Meta AI tore up its portfolio and rebuilt it again.
A week earlier, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei had published an essay calling for slower AI development. Claude is one of the models in this contest, but it never saw the essay. None of them did. Each Saturday, the models get their current five holdings and a chance to change them, with no news or headlines in the prompt.
If you’re new here: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI each started with $10,000 in fake money. They buy five AI stocks apiece, each worth less than $10 billion when purchased, and can change their picks once a week. We rank them by account value. Six portfolios of five is 30 slots, and before Saturday’s trades those slots held 19 different companies. The full rules are here.
Unless noted otherwise, values use the latest available trade through 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday, September 18, including after-hours trading.
| Model | Account value | Total return | This week |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | $11,028.84 | +10.29% | -1.36% |
| Gemini | $10,708.38 | +7.08% | -0.07% |
| Grok | $10,285.80 | +2.86% | -1.19% |
| ChatGPT | $10,130.36 | +1.30% | +2.33% |
| Meta AI | $9,267.69 | -7.32% | +2.79% |
| Claude | $9,202.62 | -7.97% | -2.23% |
Account values at the Sept. 18 price.
ChatGPT climbed back above its $10,000 stake. Meta AI passed Claude on Thursday and stayed there, which puts Claude last for the first time.
The week ended flat. Monday was anything but.
Taken together the six books were worth $60,635.11 a week ago and $60,623.69 on Friday. That's a difference of $11.42, which sounds like a week where nothing happened. By Monday night these same books had lost $1,148.86.
The line that framed the debate was this one: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Amodei wasn't asking for a stop. Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed on X on Monday, adding that progress "should be slower than it otherwise could be." Elon Musk, whose company xAI builds Grok, agreed too. Three of the six models here are made by those three companies, which is a strange sentence to write about a stock contest.
Monday was a rough session for chip and server stocks. Per CNBC's Monday tally, Micron, Intel, Marvell and Applied Materials each fell more than 4% and Nvidia about 3%. The VanEck semiconductor fund dropped 4.76%, its worst session since July 29. Cybersecurity went the other way, with Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike both up more than 13%.
Then on Wednesday the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds target range a quarter point, to 3.75% to 4%, unanimously, the first increase since 2023. Four of the six models sat below their $10,000 stake at that close. Stocks rallied anyway on Thursday and Friday, and only two were still under at the Sept. 18 price.
Then four models traded
The picks came back Saturday. Four models traded, the most this contest has seen in one week, and eleven of the thirty slots changed hands.
| Model | Sold | Bought |
|---|---|---|
| Gemini | OUST, SOUN | RCAT, ONDS |
| DeepSeek | BBAI, RZLV, SOUN | QBTS, LEU, RCAT |
| Grok | SERV | PENG |
| Meta AI | AI, APLD, BBAI, INOD, PENG | APLD, PENG, INOD, AMBA, SOUN |
ChatGPT and Claude held all five. Trades use the Sept. 18 price.
The four companies that took that money are Red Cat Holdings (RCAT) and Ondas Holdings (ONDS), both drone makers, D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), and Centrus Energy (LEU), a uranium enricher. That’s more than a full starting stake, moved in one night, into businesses that had no place in these books a week earlier.
What funded it is the part I keep looking at. BigBear.ai (BBAI) went from four owners to two. C3.ai (AI) from two to one. SoundHound (SOUN), in five of the six books as recently as week seven, is down to two. All three are crowded AI software names, and all three got smaller this week.
Gemini and DeepSeek both bought Red Cat, separately, on the same night, off an identical prompt, and disagreed about the company. Gemini reported the market cap as $1.03 billion, close to the quoted market cap. DeepSeek reported $1.8 billion, off by about 75%. Both sit far under the $10 billion ceiling so the pick stands either way, but it’s a strange split.
Grok finally traded, and Meta AI rebuilt again
Nine Saturdays, nine chances to change something, and Grok had never sold a share. This week it sold Serve Robotics (SERV) at $4.38 for an 8.93% loss and put all $1,821.41 into Penguin Solutions (PENG) at $53.06, a maker of AI servers and memory systems. Every model has now completed at least one trade.
Meta AI sold its entire book and rebought, which it has now done three times, in weeks two, five and nine. Three of the names it sold it bought straight back at different sizes. One it didn't own at all last week: SoundHound, sold seven days ago at $6.27 for a 14.34% loss and bought back at $5.93. That's Meta's fourth separate SoundHound position. Each model sees only what it currently holds each Saturday, with no record of what it used to own, which is the whole explanation and not a criticism.
Claude held everything for a fifth week and finished last
No trades again. Argan (AGX) fell 5.98% on no company news and now sits 31.63% below what Claude paid in week one. Kulicke and Soffa (KLIC) lost 3.42%, UiPath (PATH) 2.76% and Ambarella (AMBA) 2.26%. Rambus (RMBS) was the only one that rose, up 1.51%. All five are below their entry prices.
Claude says nothing broke at any of the five companies, the damage was one macro Monday, and the replacements on offer make the book worse. Argan is the one with a genuine case for selling: backlog has slipped to $2.5 billion from $2.9 billion since February, gross margin has fallen three quarters running from 25% to 19.3%, and chief executive David Watson guided to limited sequential growth this quarter. But everything Claude screened as a replacement is either more semiconductor equipment, on a book already 47% weighted to memory, or another engineering contractor with a weaker balance sheet. Selling one capital-spending stock to buy a different one, in the week the capital-spending story took the hit, isn't an upgrade.
Shares and values are rounded; account totals use full precision. Anything bought this Saturday is priced at its entry, so it shows no change yet.
DeepSeek, $11,028.84
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDYN | 404.86 | $4.94 | $5.67 | $2,296.40 |
| RGTI | 141.14 | $14.17 | $15.74 | $2,221.50 |
| QBTS | 129.64 | $17.08 | $17.08 | $2,213.72 |
| RCAT | 314.70 | $6.83 | $6.83 | $2,148.61 |
| LEU | 14.83 | $144.90 | $144.90 | $2,148.61 |
DeepSeek has led for five straight weeks.
Gemini, $10,708.38
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 342.81 | $9.13 | $10.48 | $3,592.61 |
| APLD | 76.94 | $27.12 | $27.93 | $2,148.91 |
| RCAT | 285.15 | $6.83 | $6.83 | $1,946.89 |
| ONDS | 263.09 | $7.40 | $7.40 | $1,946.89 |
| BBAI | 380.53 | $2.74 | $2.82 | $1,073.09 |
Gemini is now the only model holding C3.ai, at 33.5% of its account.
Grok, $10,285.80
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEHR | 26.21 | $76.30 | $93.50 | $2,450.85 |
| INOD | 35.77 | $55.91 | $57.22 | $2,046.86 |
| BBAI | 723.33 | $2.77 | $2.82 | $2,039.78 |
| SOUN | 324.94 | $6.16 | $5.93 | $1,926.89 |
| PENG | 34.33 | $53.06 | $53.06 | $1,821.41 |
ChatGPT, $10,130.36
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RGTI | 141.14 | $14.17 | $15.74 | $2,221.50 |
| INOD | 35.77 | $55.91 | $57.22 | $2,046.86 |
| CAMT | 13.53 | $147.85 | $149.12 | $2,017.18 |
| AEVA | 131.95 | $15.44 | $14.87 | $1,962.15 |
| APLD | 67.41 | $25.52 | $27.93 | $1,882.67 |
Meta AI, $9,267.69
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| APLD | 132.73 | $27.93 | $27.93 | $3,707.07 |
| PENG | 34.93 | $53.06 | $53.06 | $1,853.54 |
| INOD | 24.29 | $57.22 | $57.22 | $1,390.15 |
| AMBA | 21.00 | $66.19 | $66.19 | $1,390.15 |
| SOUN | 156.28 | $5.93 | $5.93 | $926.77 |
All five have new entry prices. Applied Digital, Penguin Solutions and Innodata are repurchases; Applied Digital and SoundHound sit exactly on the 40% and 10% sizing limits.
Claude, $9,202.62
| Ticker | Shares | Entry | Sept. 18 | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RMBS | 26.95 | $91.48 | $88.28 | $2,379.21 |
| KLIC | 23.87 | $89.26 | $83.54 | $1,994.40 |
| AMBA | 29.38 | $68.07 | $66.19 | $1,944.76 |
| PATH | 113.36 | $16.26 | $13.38 | $1,516.76 |
| AGX | 3.52 | $568.93 | $389.00 | $1,367.48 |
Saturday took those 30 slots from 19 companies to 20. Ouster, Rezolve AI and Serve Robotics left the contest entirely. Every pick was checked against Robinhood before it went in a book, and for the first time since I started collecting these weekly, not one broke a rule. The running scoreboard is on the tracker, and last week is here.
