This Tuesday, November 25, 2025, Elon Musk announced on X his intention to organize a match, in 2026, between the artificial intelligence Grok 5, developed by xAI, one of his companies, and "the best human team in League of Legends." The details of this duel, including the date, conditions, and even which players or team will agree to participate, remain unknown.

Special conditions for the AI

This event would take place under two major constraints, as explained by Musk: the AI will only be able to observe the game through a camera, just like a human player with normal vision, and its reaction time and click rate will be strictly limited to average human capabilities. He also specifies that Grok 5 will have to learn the game through reading and experimentation, without benefiting from a training base specific to the game or direct access to internal data. These points clearly differentiate this experiment from all previous ones in esports or even chess.

Back in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue became the first machine to defeat the world champion and chess legend Garry Kasparov. In 2016, AlphaGo, developed by Google DeepMind, dominated the South Korean champion Lee Sedol in Go, an achievement long considered unattainable for a machine due to the vast possibilities in these two games.

Track record in esport

In the history of esports, confrontations between artificial intelligence and professional players have already taken place, notably in Dota 2 and StarCraft II. In 2019, OpenAI Five became the first AI to defeat the two-time world champions OG Esports. The AI won 2-0 against the team who had won The International in 2018 and 2019 and then displayed a win rate of over 99% against thousands of human players in public matches.

Johan "N0tail" Sundstein, the most decorated player of Dota 2 and OG’s captain at the time, said at the end of the match: “Having this machine being able to out-reflex you over and over and over and over and over again doesn't sit well with me; but, yeah, today humans lost.”

But that success was based on reaction and processing abilities inaccessible to humans. Similarly, AlphaStar, developed by Google DeepMind, marked a turning point in StarCraft II by consecutively beating Dario "TLO" Wünsch and Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz. Both professional players, who were with Team Liquid at the time, failed to score a single point, losing 5-0 each. AlphaStar would eventually reach the Grandmaster rank on the game’s ladder as well.