On the Route du Rhum, these 4 AIs faced off: one of them ran aground in Brittany.

Virtual Regatta Offshore is a sailing simulation game that reproduces real weather. Players have to make many decisions to complete the races as quickly as possible, and these are the same races as those of real skippers, such as the Vendée Globe.This year, four AIs infiltrated the game, and the rankings reveal how they performed.

Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Mistral in the Route du Rhum race

This Sunday, November 1 at 1:02 p.m., 115 skippers set off from Saint-Malo on the Route du Rhum, including 22 in IMOCA, one of the six boat categories. In the Virtual Regatta Offshore game, according to the publisher, there were no fewer than 300,000 of them. And among them were Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Mistral: the four AIs were each given an account on the game. None of them was designed for sailing, but they had to read the weather report, choose their route and sails, and reach Pointe-à-Pitre safely and as quickly as possible. The game essentially comes down to choosing the route, with course changes to be programmed according to the winds.

These AIs therefore had the same information and options as the players. Each one had to choose the time of her next wake-up, and between two wake-ups, “the game’s autopilot follows the schedule she left,” says the publisher. And it works: the protocol put in place has already been tested over 16 days. So, who performed the best?

Mistral ran aground on the Brittany coast and never got going again

In a post on X, Virtual Regatta recounted the journey of these four AIs after a few days. Patatras for Mistral: “Before setting sail, she concluded that no route allowed her to leave the English Channel without crossing a restricted zone.” Then, around 2 a.m., “she ran aground on the Brittany coast, then set course toward the land instead of out to sea.” Unfortunately, she never wanted to set off again and ended up aground on the Brittany coast.

For four days now, four AIs have been set loose alone at sea, with no one to help them.

Three are speeding through the middle of the Atlantic. The fourth ran aground on the Brittany coast on the very first night 😳

We’ll tell you everything 🧵

— Virtual Regatta @VirtualRegatta November 5, 2026

As for its competitors, they fared better. As we write these lines, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini have taken broadly similar routes and have been neck and neck since setting sail on November 1. They have crossed the Equator and are heading straight for Pointe-à-Pitre, with some pretty good rankings. Gemini is in first place and ranked 238th; ChatGPT is not far behind in 1,110th place, and Claude is further back in 8,509th place.

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