Does AI Have an IQ Over 130? What AI IQ Scores Mean and Where They Break Down

Headlines announcing that the latest AI has passed IQ 130 are becoming routine. Taken at face value, the number corresponds to the top 2% of people. But what exactly was measured, and how? This article looks at how AI IQ figures are produced and asks, starting from the definition of IQ, whether they can be read the way human scores are.

How an AI IQ is measured

Most AI IQ figures quoted in the media come from TrackingAI, an independent benchmarking site. It gives models two tests: the public figure-pattern IQ test from Mensa Norway (35 items, 25-minute limit) and an offline test written by a Mensa member that has never been posted on the internet. Raw results are converted to IQ with tables built for humans.

Items are generally verbalized, that is, described in text, and models that accept images are also shown the figures themselves. The site publishes procedural details such as re-asking an item up to ten times if the model refuses to answer.

By this method, 2025 reports put OpenAI's o3 at the equivalent of IQ 136 on Mensa Norway and Gemini 2.5 Pro at 128, among others. The figures change with every model update, so any specific value is a snapshot rather than a fixed property.

IQ is a position within a human population

Return to the definition. IQ is not an absolute quantity of intelligence but a relative score: raw scores from a same-age human population are standardized to mean 100 and SD 15 (see What is the average IQ?). IQ 130 means roughly the top 2% only because that reference population exists.

An AI has no age and no cohort of same-age AIs to be compared with. Reading its raw score off a human table is a translation that says a human with this many correct answers would score 130. It does not mean the AI possesses the intelligence of the top 2% of humans. The same logic explains why dog and cat intelligence cannot be expressed on the human IQ scale (see Where do cats rank in animal intelligence?).

Public tests can be in the training data

A second limit is test security. Anyone can take the Mensa Norway test online, so the items and answers may be part of a model's training data. TrackingAI keeps a separate never-published test precisely to avoid this contamination.

In human testing, knowing the items in advance raises the score without raising intelligence (see Does practicing IQ tests help?). For AI, the training corpus is so vast that distinguishing solving a new problem from reproducing a seen one becomes fundamentally hard.

What peer-reviewed research has shown

Peer-reviewed work exists. Webb and colleagues (2023) directly compared GPT-3 (text-davinci-003) with human participants on tasks including a text-based matrix reasoning problem built on the rule structure of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, as well as letter-string analogies. GPT-3 matched or exceeded humans in most settings, which the authors describe as an emergent capacity for abstract pattern induction.

What the study showed, however, is performance on specific task formats. The paper itself does not claim to have measured intelligence as a whole. Human IQ tests are valid because their scores correlate consistently with external criteria such as academic and occupational outcomes (see IQ and school grades); AI scores have no such backing yet.

Same items, different solving process

Raven-type items ask you to spot the rule in a grid of figures, such as rotation, counting, or overlay, and fill the blank (see What are Raven's Progressive Matrices?). Humans solve them with visual working memory and reasoning; a model receiving a verbalized item completes statistical patterns over sequences of symbols.

Because the underlying processing differs even when the number of correct answers is the same, the IQ figure supports neither the conclusion that AI is smarter than people nor that it is dumber. What can be compared is only the accuracy rate on this task format.

Why take an IQ test in the age of AI

The purpose of an IQ test does not change because AI can solve figure puzzles. The goal is to learn where your reasoning stands among people, which is independent of AI performance. If anything, as routine work moves to AI, knowing which kinds of reasoning you are good at becomes more valuable. How leaning on AI affects thinking is covered in Does relying on AI make you dumber?.

The free NekoIQ IQ test scores 20 questions across spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, logical reasoning, and classification (about 10 minutes) with item response theory and reports an estimated IQ, deviation score, and top percentage on the mean-100, SD-15 scale (see What is IRT?). The numbers are estimates, not the results of a formal psychological assessment.