“I think this is the year that, at least by the competitive coding benchmark, AI becomes better than humans at competitive coding — and stays better, forever. At the rate we're going, I would be surprised if it's 2027. I think it's going to be sooner. (o1-preview was about the millionth-best competitive programmer in the world, o1 was in the top 1,000, and o3 ranked 175th.)”

Kevin WeilCEO

Chief Product Officer, OpenAI

In September 2025 OpenAI's reasoning system scored a perfect 12/12 at the ICPC World Finals — enough for a first-place human ranking, ahead of all 139 university teams — and models took IOI gold, so AI matched or beat the best humans in standard algorithmic contests. But no AI held the top human competitive-programming rating outright by year-end, and a human (Psyho) beat OpenAI's model at the AtCoder World Tour Finals heuristic contest in July 2025, so the 'better forever' framing was not established.