What Is ChatGPT's IQ? How AI Models Score on Human IQ Tests

The Scores, Date by Date

AI scores change by the month, so every figure here carries the date it was reported and the person who reported it. The longest-running record belongs to Maxim Lott, a journalist who has tested chatbots on IQ-style puzzles since at least early 2024 and publishes results on his site TrackingAI and his newsletter, Maximum Truth.

Read the table as a trend, not a leaderboard. Model names change, companies adjust settings after launch, and a single week's result can swing by several points. Progress is not smooth: Lott reported that AI scores barely moved for about six months before o1-preview arrived in September 2024.

How TrackingAI Tests a Chatbot

Lott uses two instruments. The first is the Mensa Norway test, a public online quiz of 35 visual-pattern items with a 25-minute limit; our guide to the Mensa Norway test explains its format. The second is an offline test written from scratch by a Mensa member identified as Jurij and never posted on the internet.

Lott normed the offline items against the Mensa Norway items by having his readers take both, so that a 100 means roughly the same on each. The September 2024 calibration rested on about 40 readers. Lott reported that the Mensa Norway test itself was normed on 80 people with official IQ scores, a claim from its creator that he did not verify. According to 36Kr's September 2026 report, TrackingAI tests more than 30 models a week and averages each model's last seven attempts. Some models see the puzzles as images; others receive them described in words, which has so far produced higher scores.

The Contamination Problem

A language model learns from a vast scrape of public text. If a test's questions and answers sit somewhere in that scrape, a high score may reflect memory rather than reasoning. Lott called this the most common objection to his early results, and he notes that Mensa Norway answers exist online.

The gap between his two tests is the evidence. In October 2025, ChatGPT Pro scored 148 on the public test and 117 on the private one. Lott wrote that contamination partly explains why top systems near the public test's ceiling while scoring about 130 offline.

Researchers have documented the problem on other benchmarks. Shahriar Golchin and Mihai Surdeanu, in a 2023 preprint, built a method to detect test items a model has memorized and concluded that GPT-4 had seen parts of three standard datasets, including AG News and XSum. Any test with published answers carries the same risk, which is why the offline score is the more meaningful number.

Why an AI Score Is Not a Human IQ

A human IQ is a deviation score. It compares one person with a large, representative sample of people the same age, scaled to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. No such sample exists for machines, and the human sample was never designed to rank them.

• Uneven profiles. Roivainen gave ChatGPT the Vocabulary, Similarities, Comprehension, Information and Arithmetic subtests of the WAIS-III. It earned a Verbal IQ of 155, yet he observed that it failed a simple riddle. He skipped Digit Span, a working-memory task, because the chatbot lacks that memory system, and nonverbal subtests were not possible.
• Different conditions. A model does not tire, can retry, and runs with a compute budget the vendor sets. Time limits built for human attention do not constrain it in the same way.
• Ceiling effects. 36Kr noted that Mensa Norway reports human scores only up to 145. In December 2025 Lott said he planned to improve his test's granularity above 130, where it separates top systems poorly.
• Breadth. Lott quoted the economist Tyler Cowen's view that such tests underweight a model's extreme breadth of knowledge, the thing it does best.

The adult intelligence battery behind most clinical scores is described in WAIS-IV explained.

What the Scores Do Show

The trend is real even if the number is not an IQ. Lott measured an average gain of about 2.5 IQ points a month for the leading AI between May 2024 and October 2025, from the mid-80s to about 130. He projected in October 2025 that leading systems would top out on human IQ tests in late 2027.

Academic work points the same way. In 2023, Taylor Webb, Keith Holyoak and Hongjing Lu reported in Nature Human Behaviour that GPT-3 matched or surpassed human participants on most analogy tasks, including a text version of matrix problems modeled on Raven's Progressive Matrices. They called the ability emergent: it arose without training on those specific tasks.

What the scores cannot show is whether a system understands, plans or judges as a person does. Alan Turing posed that question in 1950 with a conversation test, not a puzzle sheet; see what is the Turing test and the history of artificial intelligence.

How the Numbers Map Onto Human Scores

On a human scale, an offline score of 130 would place a person at about the 98th percentile, the traditional Mensa threshold. See what an IQ of 130 means. A 151 would be rarer than 1 in 1,000. Those comparisons describe the scale, not the machine: the model reached its score under conditions no human test taker faces.

For human scores, the same caution about format applies in reverse. Quick online quizzes are useful practice and poor measurement; read are online IQ tests accurate. Our free IQ test is a practice screener, not a clinical assessment. Every related guide is collected in IQ guides.

Editorial standard: IQ figures for historical figures are retrospective estimates and are labeled as such; scores for living people appear only when the person disclosed them or a reputable outlet reported them. Corrections: contact the editors.