For the seventh year in a row, the Future Perfect staff — plus assorted other experts from around Vox — convened near the end of the year to make forecasts about major events in 2026.  Perhaps in keeping with the year we just experienced, the prognostication had grim overtones. Will the US remain an electoral democracy? Will the country fall into a recession? Will there be war in Taiwan? Will more states ban lab-cultivated meat? Will a Category 5 hurricane make landfall in the US? Will Beyoncé release a rock album? (Which is maybe just grim to me — there are so many better options!)  As always, we try to avoid random guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached. That’s meant to give you a sense of our confidence in our forecasts. The idea here is to exemplify epistemic honesty — being as transparent as we can about what we know we know, what we know we don’t, and what we don’t know, we don’t know.  As we have every year, we’ll check back at the end of 2026 and provide a report card on how we did, whether our accuracy ends up being Nostradamus level, or more like a band of blindfolded monkeys throwing darts at a board. You can check out how we did in 2025 here. We hope you enjoy reading — and don’t forget to update your priors. —Bryan Walsh The United States The US falls from the ranks of liberal democracies in the leading V-DEM index, but remains an electoral democracy (60 percent) Entering 2026, assessing the health of American democracy is a bit of a puzzle. There is no doubt that, in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, American democracy has weakened significantly. He has smashed through constitutional constraints on his power, targeted his political opponents for repression, and run roughshod over civil liberties protections. It’s bad enough that three of the world’s top scholars of comparative democracy — Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Lucan Way — have concluded that the United States has crossed the line into a form of authoritarianism. On the other hand, there is little indication that Trump has been able to create a lock on power — or even significantly compromise the fairness of elections. Democrats dominated elections in 2025, anti-government activists operate freely, and the media is (mostly) as independent and critical as it was before Inauguration Day. When I spoke to Levitsky in December, he told me that Trump was failing “at consolidating autocratic power.” For this reason, my own view is that the United States is still best classified as democracy, albeit a much weakened one. V-DEM, the leading academic metric of democracy, distinguishes between two classes of democracy — the stronger liberal democracy and weaker electoral democracy. When V-Dem releases its ratings for the past year, I expect the United States will fall from the former into the latter. However, my confidence is low. What’s happening in the US is unprecedented for the world’s hegemon, and there is at least some credible evidence of bias in global democracy ratings — making the ultimate outcome a bit tricky to say for sure. —Zack Beauchamp Democrats will take back at least one house of Congress (95 percent) If the last one was tricky, this one is straightforward. There are at least five clear reasons to believe Democrats are headed for a midterm romp. Point 1: In modern American politics, the president’s party almost always performs poorly in midterms. Point 2: The Democratic Party is increasingly strong with college-educated voters, who tend to turn out more reliably in midterms than non-college voters — meaning the party has a structural leg up in those contests. Point 3: Trump is an especially unpopular incumbent. The only 21st-century president with equivalently bad numbers at this point in his term was Trump himself, who experienced a massive electoral wipeout in the 2018 midterms. And there is real evidence Trump’s coalition is fraying from the inside. Point 4: Democrats have dominated 2025 elections so consistently that it has become a meaningful indication of 2026 performance. Point 5: Voter dissatisfaction is driven by a combination of affordability and concerns about his extreme policies in areas like immigration, and the White House seems either unable or unwilling to change in response to these concerns. For all these reasons, Democrats are basically a lock to take back the House — barring hard-to-pull-off election tampering or some kind of unforeseen event that transforms the political environment. The Senate map is unfavorable, making it a much tougher fight, but they’re still competitive given the fundamentals. —ZB At least one major function remains at the Education Department (70 percent) The dismantling of the Education Department was one of the biggest stories in the early days of Trump’s second term, as the administration fired hundreds of staffers and Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised to lead the department on its “historic final mission.”  The president can’t actually dissolve the department without an act of Congress, but his administration has been moving bits of it to other agencies since the spring. In November, the White House announced perhaps the biggest shift yet, moving programs supporting K-12 students to the Labor Department, with other functions parceled out to the Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, and State. However, experts have long warned that other departments don’t have the expertise to take over Education staffers’ work, and the moves that have already occurred have reportedly been plagued with problems. Now Republican lawmakers are starting to voice concerns about what happens if the administration tries to transfer special education programs to another department, a move it has not yet made but hasn’t ruled out.  The Trump administration has already done lasting damage to the department, experts say. But getting rid of an agency is a lot harder in practice than in theory, and with Republicans starting to throw up warning signs, it’s more likely than not that at least one function of the department will remain through the end of next year. —Anna North The Supreme Court will rule against Trump in the tariffs cases currently before the Court (70 percent) To date, at least three federal courts have ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), when he imposed a broad range of constantly shifting tariffs on foreign imports. The Supreme Court is likely to join these three courts before the close of its current term. For the most part, this Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has been extraordinarily loyal to Trump. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. But the Republican justices do sometimes break with Trump on issues that divide Republicans, and especially on issues that divide conservative legal elites. The tariffs cases are just such an issue. At least some of the lawsuits challenging the tariffs were brought by right-leaning legal shops that hew to the GOP’s more traditional, libertarian views on foreign trade. Numerous Republican luminaries have joined briefs opposing the tariffs,  Including former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), an early mentor to Justice Clarence Thomas. Over the spring, at a conference hosted by the conservative Federalist Society, a number of speakers criticized the tariffs and questioned their legality. At the Supreme Court argument on the tariffs in November, the Court’s Republicans did, indeed, appear divided on whether to back Trump. While some members of the Court defended the tariffs, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — all Republicans — asked very skeptical questions of Trump’s lawyer. It is always dangerous business to predict that this Supreme Court will break with a Republican president, which is why I still think there is a 30 percent chance that Trump prevails. And even if Trump does lose this round of litigation, he is likely to attempt to reinstate at least some of his tariffs by invoking other statutes. But my prediction will come true if the Court rules that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA when he imposed his tariffs on imports. —Ian Millhiser Trump will replace at least one member of the Supreme Court by the end of 2026 (75 percent) Trump is unpopular — a recent Associated Press poll pegs his approval rating at 36 percent — and his party just got hosed in the 2025 elections. Republicans are still favored to hold onto the Senate after the 2026 midterms, largely because the Senate is malapportioned to favor small states that tend to vote for the GOP, but the Republican Party is in a deep enough hole that it could lose both houses of Congress. And if the Democrats do take the Senate, they can prevent Trump from ever confirming another federal judge again. Which brings us to 75-year-old Justice Samuel Alito.  Alito is the Court’s most unapologetic partisan. If you want a full rundown of Alito’s history of rulings favoring the Republican Party, I encourage you to read my profile of him entitled “The Republican Party’s man inside the Supreme Court.” The short of it is that he’s often willing to embrace arguments that even his fellow Republican justices find embarrassing, at least when those arguments favor the GOP or its preferred policy outcomes. If Alito retires while Republicans still control the Senate, he can be confident that his replacement will be a Republican who shares his views on the overwhelming majority of issues. He might even be replaced by one of his former law clerks.  If Alito does not retire, by contrast, he risks losing his last chance to retire under a Republican president and a Republican Senate. In the worst case scenario (from Alito’s perspective), he could die after Democrats regain both the White House and the Senate, ensuring that he will be replaced by his ideological opposite. There’s also a chance that a different justice could either retire or die. Thomas is 77. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is 71. Roberts is 70. If any justice leaves the Court in 2026, a Republican Senate will almost certainly confirm Trump’s nominee to replace them. That said, there is a chance that Alito and his fellow Republican justices are enjoying the power that comes with being part of a six-justice supermajority so much that they won’t want to give it up. But Alito has been such a reliable partisan during his time on the bench that it would be surprising if he denied his party its best chance to replace him with a younger version of himself. —IM The world Benjamin Netanyahu will not be the prime minister of Israel by the end of the year (65 percent) Netanyahu has led the Israeli government for 15 of the last 16 years. He has weathered indictments, a criminal trial, coalition fractures, and of course the horrors of the Gaza war. Why would anyone bet against him in the 2026 elections (currently scheduled for October)? The answer, I think, is that he has been living on borrowed time since October 7, 2023. After that day’s atrocities, Netanyahu’s poll numbers collapsed — with most Israelis blaming him and his government for Hamas’s successful attack. His survival since then has had nothing to do with voters, and everything to do with coalition management: He has managed to prevent his far-right coalition partners from defecting and triggering early elections. But in 2026, there will be elections — and all indications are that his coalition doesn’t have the votes.  “The Netanyahu government has not been able to win a majority in any credible survey,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading Israeli pollster, told me last year. That said, you really do not want to count Netanyahu out. And there are easy-to-imagine scenarios where he survives despite his obvious problems. Currently, the best-polling opposition party is led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. While Bennett is strongly anti-Netanyahu, he is also a right-winger — and to form an anti-Netanyahu government, polls suggest he’d likely need support from a broad coalition, including the left and even an Arab party. You can easily imagine Bennett failing to overcome the opposition’s ideological divisions and striking some kind of deal with Netanyahu instead. Or you could imagine protracted coalition negotiations that leave Netanyahu in power for months after the October elections, even if he is deposed in 2027. The point is that there’s a lot of uncertainty here. But I’m going to bet on the most consistent thing: Polls showing that a clear majority of Israelis are done with Bibi. —ZB There will not be a ceasefire, agreed to by both Ukraine and Russia and observed for at least 30 days, by December 31, 2026 (60 percent) The Trump administration has been pushing hard for a ceasefire deal in recent weeks and there was some optimism it might end before Christmas. But the underlying dynamics of the conflict are still the same and still make an end to the war in the coming months more unlikely.  Despite the heavy casualties Russia is taking, the damage to its economy inflicted by sanctions, and the slow pace of progress on the battlefield, Russian President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning the war and is unlikely to be satisfied with any deal that does not severely curtail Ukraine’s sovereignty. It’s not even clear if the 28-point plan cooked up by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in November, which was heavily tilted toward Russian interests, would have been enough to satisfy him.  On the other side, Ukrainian leaders mostly accept at this point that they’re unlikely to regain all of the territory currently held by Russia by military force. But they are just as unlikely to accept Trump’s recent demands that they cede the so-called fortress belt of heavily defended positions in eastern Ukraine, something that would be suicidal fairly likely event that Russia restarts its war in a few years. And while NATO membership may be off the table at this point, Ukraine is likely to insist on security guarantees from NATO countries that will probably be unacceptable to the Russian side.  While US support for Ukraine gives it significant leverage, European countries are now the primary economic and military backers of the Ukrainian war effort and Ukrainians are making far more weapons of their own, including the ubiquitous drones that are playing such a vital role on the battlefield.  For all Trump’s public attacks on Ukraine, the United States is still providing intelligence support to the Ukrainian military and selling the country for weapons (in many cases, paid for by Europe). And if the past year’s back and forth is any indication, Trump’s current pro-Moscow tilt could shift.  Trump’s success with the Gaza ceasefire showed that these deals can come together much more quickly than many expect, but for a variety of reasons, the combatants in Ukraine are less susceptible to American pressure and less willing to call off the fighting. Most likely, Ukraine is facing a fifth year of devastating and brutal war. —Joshua Keating Between January 1 and December 31, 2026, China does not impose a full blockade of Taiwan or launch a declared invasion (75 percent) In 2021, Adm. Phil Davidson, then the head of Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress he believed China would likely seek to achieve its ambition of taking control of Taiwan “in the next six years.” We’re now approaching the later end of what has become known in defense circles as the “Davidson window.” But for the moment, war — or something close to it — still seems unlikely. The biggest question mark around a military scenario in Taiwan is whether the US would intervene directly to defend the island. And the best case for the argument that China will move soon is that President Donald Trump’s words and actions have given little reason to believe he would do that. But an amphibious invasion of a mountainous and densely populated island with a hostile population is still a daunting prospect even if the US doesn’t get involved.  A blockade or quarantine might be more likely, something Taiwan’s economy is vulnerable to, but the island’s importance to the global tech economy means the fallout from a blockade would be both massive and widespread. (One analysis predicted a blockade of Taiwan would cost the world $2 trillion in lost economic activity.) And the US is not the only country that might come to Taiwan’s aid: Japan’s new prime minister recently enraged Beijing by suggesting a Taiwan crisis would be a survival threatening situation for Japan, meaning it would have legal justification to deploy its military.  To put it bluntly, at the moment, Xi Jinping has a good thing going with Trump, who is seeking better trade relations with China and has even gone so far as to agree to sell advanced microchips that the Chinese never even asked for. China may also be holding out for the possibility of “peaceful reunification.” The island’s major opposition party, the Kuomintang, now favors much closer relations with Beijing.  We should absolutely expect more economic pressure on Taiwan and its supporters abroad, more moves to block diplomatic contacts between Taiwan and the outside world, more influence campaigns and propaganda directed at the Taiwanese public, and even possible “gray zone” attacks targeting Taiwan’s infrastructure, such as undersea communications cables.  Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine showed that sometimes autocratic leaders can make risky moves that seem to make little sense from the outside, but assuming Xi is a bit more level-headed, he’s unlikely to gamble it all on an invasion or blockade in the coming year. —JK   Economy At least two more states will pass laws effectively ending apartment bans (single-family-only zoning) in most residential areas statewide (45 percent)   The last few years have seen the birth of a new paradigm in how housing in the United States is regulated and built. Ever since the widespread adoption of zoning codes over the last century, it’s been local governments — cities, suburbs, small towns — that decide what’s allowed to be built, usually to an extreme degree of prescriptiveness. Most residential land across the country is zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes — no duplexes, triplexes, or apartment buildings allowed. That is, as I wrote about last year, what’s fundamentally at the root of the great American housing shortage and housing affordability crisis. But those rules are steadily, if slowly and unevenly, starting to change. Many states have passed legislation that begins to unwind the morass of local obstacles to building homes, with single-family-exclusive zoning being a frequent target. While this trend is technically a form of centralization, I think it’s better to think of it as a kind of deregulation that gives power back to people to create things in their communities. California, Maine, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington all now have laws requiring local governments to allow at least duplexes, and in some cases even more homes, on lots zoned for single-family homes in many residential areas. Several other states are considering similar bills, and more will probably be introduced this year.  These state-level zoning preemption laws are, in reality, usually enormously complex and often include carveouts and exceptions that were needed to get the legislation over the finish line because local opposition to new housing can be fierce. So while I think we’re extremely likely to see more states pass housing liberalization laws in 2026, I think the chances that two more states pass laws with my exact criteria — ending single-family zoning in the residential areas that cover most of the state’s population — are just under 50-50. —Marina Bolotnikova  Total billionaire wealth will exceed $17 trillion, as calculated by the UBS Billionaire Ambitions report (85 percent) The grass is green. The sky is blue. The rich get richer.  Some things are just common sense. But actually, the wealth of the very wealthiest people does not always get bigger year after year. Take 2022, for example, when stock market woes made the world’s billionaires about $2 trillion poorer than they were the year before. Womp, womp. But ever since then, the ultra-rich have indeed only gotten richer. A new billionaire was born every 37 hours of 2025, lifting the total number of billionaires to nearly 3,000 and their collective wealth to a record-shattering $15.8 trillion, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions report. Many have gotten rich off the AI boom, while others are heirs and heiresses, whose inheritances grew by a collective $297.8 billion last year as part of a giant wealth transfer that’s just getting started.  As long as nobody bursts their bubble, the ultra-rich will probably just get richer in 2026. And if their wealth keeps growing at the rate it has been, they’ll very likely be sitting on over $17 trillion by the time UBS publishes its report next winter. —Sara Herschander The US will experience a recession in 2026 (55 percent) Recession forecasts are the meteorology of economics: Everyone complains when you’re wrong, and nobody sends thank you notes when you’re right. Still, the reason I’m slightly over 50 percent is simple: Late-cycle economic risk is real, and the list of plausible triggers — the AI bubble popping, trade policy finally hitting home, a major international crisis — is long. Even in “good” times, the US economy is a balancing act between consumer spending, business investment, financial conditions, and whatever policy choices Washington makes in a given week. It doesn’t take a Great Depression-level shock to tip that balance — sometimes it’s just interest rates staying tighter longer than expected, a confidence shock, or a geopolitical event that hits energy and trade. And if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the economy can fall down the stairs faster than it can climb them. For scoring, I’d define “recession” as a National Bureau of Economic Research-dated recession that begins in calendar year 2026. If the NBER hasn’t ruled by the time we do our year-end grading (they are not known for sprinting), we’ll use a proxy: two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth in 2026. Why only 55 percent? Because the US has a stubborn capacity to muddle through — until it doesn’t. —BW Animals The share of cage-free eggs in the US will not surpass 50 percent in 2026 (60 percent) At the end of 2024, cage-free eggs accounted for 38.7 percent of the US egg supply. By September 2025 — the most recent data available — that figure hit 45.3 percent. It was a major shift for such a short period, and equates to millions of egg-laying hens no longer spending their entire lives in tiny cages. I think that in 2026, this trend will continue, but not fast enough for the US egg supply to reach 50 percent cage-free by the end of September. And that’s because a few big events occurred in 2025 that spurred this momentum that won’t occur next year.  The first is that laws in three states — Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan — that require eggs sold to be cage-free went into effect in 2025 (though Arizona quickly delayed its implementation by years). No new laws will go into effect next year.  Additionally, over the last decade, hundreds of food companies pledged to source cage-free eggs, and many set a 2025 deadline. While a lot of them have not followed through on their pledge, a lot inched closer during this deadline year. I could be — and hope I will be — wrong, and there are two reasons why I might lose this prediction. The first is that animal advocacy groups are now focused on pressuring grocery chains to meet their cage-free pledges, and if they’re successful in 2026, that could quickly tip the scales, since grocery stores account for where most eggs are sold. Second, there’s bird flu — if the virus were to disproportionately hit cage farms this winter and spring, that would affect the ratio of cage-free to cage eggs for much of 2026. The food industry’s rapid move away from cages for egg-laying hens is a major success story for the modern animal rights movement, and hitting 50 percent of the US egg supply will be an important milestone. I think it’ll happen soon — let’s say by March 1, 2027 — but I don’t think it’s in the cards by the end of September, 2026. —Kenny Torrella At least one US state will ban lab-grown meat in 2026 (60 percent) In 2024, Florida and Alabama banned the production and sale of lab-grown, or cell-cultivated, meat. They represented unabashed protectionism — favoring livestock farmers over startup food companies — and hollow, conspiratorial culture war posturing (when he signed the bill into law, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis implied this was a contest between real Floridians and globalist elites). Even though many ranchers and farming groups have opposed the bans, arguing that it looks bad to outlaw your competition, five more states passed similar laws in 2025 — three with full-on bans (Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska), and two with two-year bans (Texas and Indiana). In many other states, lawmakers introduced similar bills that failed, and I figure at least one will succeed next year (for the purpose of accuracy, I’ll count a temporary ban as a ban). I’m not particularly confident, however, because some states seemed to have settled on strict, unfavorable labeling requirements for cell-cultivated meat producers as opposed to banning the product altogether. And in some states, the bills have proven controversial (for example, many ranchers in Wyoming were opposed to a ban on libertarian grounds). At this moment, the bans mean little in practical terms — only a few restaurants around the country serve cell-cultivated meat, and in small quantities. But the bans could pose a problem for the industry down the road if they figure out how to affordably produce cell-cultivated meat at scale. —KT The US will authorize mass bird flu vaccination for at least one major US poultry category — egg-laying hens, broiler chickens, or turkeys (35 percent) The US is entering its fifth year of a truly ghastly bird flu outbreak. It’s caused dozens of human bird flu cases across the country, it’s sparked an outbreak in dairy cows, it’s sent egg prices soaring, and it’s been catastrophic for the tens of millions of chickens and turkeys who’ve died horrible deaths on infected farms. And all this is happening despite the fact that we already have vaccines that could dramatically blunt the damage.  So why, four years into this outbreak, have we managed to do so little to get avian flu under control?  It has more to do with bureaucracy and economic interests than scientific capacity. The American chicken meat industry exports a significant share of its product abroad, and the fear is that our trading partners would reject US chicken because of the challenge of determining whether a poultry bird is infected with avian flu or simply has antibodies from vaccination. So instead of vaccinating, the US has resorted to mass killing chickens and turkeys — quite painfully — in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to control the spread.  As the outbreak stretches on, and egg and turkey producers complain that they aren’t allowed to vaccinate because of the chicken industry’s trade concerns, pressure has mounted for US regulators to approve a plan to start vaccinating poultry birds across the country — something that ought to be a no-brainer given that, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella has pointed out, the costs of managing the outbreak have been much higher than the value of the chicken industry’s exports. As of last summer, the US Department of Agriculture was reportedly working on such a plan.  Will we start routinely vaccinating in 2026? We’re closer than we have been in any previous year, but securing assurances from trade partners is hard, long work, as is devising a plan for vaccine rollout that satisfies those partners, and all indications are that we’re not close yet. If we start to see more severe bird flu spread in 2026 and sustained spikes in egg prices, the USDA’s calculus might change. But for now, I think we’re less likely than not to see the agency authorize vaccination as part of a standard avian flu control program in poultry birds (rather than just as part of limited pilots or experimental uses). —MB Climate Global data center electricity demand will stay below 3 percent of total electricity in 2026 (80 percent) Per the International Energy Agency, data centers consumed 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity in 2024, around 415 terawatt-hours. Though these massive, energy-hungry facilities are proliferating at a rapid pace, they’re still a small fraction of humanity’s energy use. Tech companies say they need many more of them, particularly to run their AI products, but data centers have an image problem. They are starting to wear out their welcome in some communities and are being thoroughly shunned in others. Only 44 percent of Americans say they would want one of these giant humming boxes near them. Speculation around their energy demand is already starting to raise electricity prices for consumers in some markets.  Now some environmental groups and activists are already calling for a moratorium on new data center construction, not just voting down individual projects, and at least one community has officially imposed a pause.  There are also strains on the global supply chain for data center components, so even places ready to go on a construction spree will have to wait for parts to catch up. Additionally, more power generators are continuing to come online, so the percentage share that goes to data centers won’t rise as quickly. —Umair Irfan At least one Category 5 hurricane makes landfall in the continental US, as defined by the National Hurricane Center (10 percent) The United States lucked out in 2025 with no major hurricane hitting the mainland. However, it’s only a matter of time before one does so again. The question is how strong it will be. There are typically 14 storms strong enough to be given a name in any year, but only 45 were ever known to have reached Category 5 strength, with sustained winds at 158 miles per hour. Fewer still maintained their full strength as they reached the shore.   The last Category 5 hurricane to hammer the continental US was Hurricane Michael in 2018, so baseline chances of this happening again next year are fairly low. The year 2026 is poised to start as a La Niña year, where the surface of the Pacific Ocean cools to below-average temperatures. That tends to create more favorable conditions for hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. The pattern is then lonely to shift into a neutral phase that has minimal effects on cyclones in the Atlantic. The other key variable is how much heat is in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes run on warm water, and the fever of record-high temperatures broke in the Atlantic Ocean this year. Add to that the variability in how hurricanes travel and you have a fairly low chance of the most powerful type of hurricane hitting the continental US at maximum power next year. —UI Science and technology  At least one state-of-the-art AI system can complete a task that takes humans 16 hours, succeeding on at least half of its attempts (75 percent) One of the past year’s most striking AI-related visuals was a graph showing that the length of tasks AI can do is doubling every seven months. This may seem a bit in the weeds, but it’s actually really important, because it speaks to AI’s growing ability to work autonomously. According to METR, the research group that made this graph, Claude Opus 4.5 has already hit four hours and 49 minutes, which means that the chatbot is expected to succeed at least 50 percent of the time on tasks that took humans that long. Extrapolating from this graph, I predict that at least one AI model will hit at least 16 hours by the end of 2026. I’m making this prediction with 75 percent confidence.  I could go higher, but I won’t, because a few variables could still change the trajectory. For example, if compute growth slows, we could see substantial delays in capability milestones. I also want to emphasize that you shouldn’t take this to mean that AI will put you out of work by the end of 2026: What’s being measured here is AI’s ability to succeed at very particular tasks, not its ability to generalize to the whole of what you can do. — Sigal Samuel   Congress will not pass, and Trump will not sign, any comprehensive federal legislation primarily focused on AI safety (90 percent) The White House has come out strongly against state-level AI regulation, releasing an executive order in December saying that the “Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones.”  But it’s very unlikely that we’ll see comprehensive federal legislation in 2026 requiring AI companies to implement safety plans. For one thing, there is no consensus on what shape such a national framework should take. For another, the White House’s attempt to ban state-level regulation (with the idea of putting in a national framework instead) has proven extremely unpopular, including among Republicans. Plus, with so much tech lobbying aimed at relaxing regulation rather than entrenching it, there’s little incentive for the White House to push through comprehensive federal legislation on safety.  Taken together, all this leads me to think that while Congress may pass more specific AI provisions in 2026 (for example, related to national defense), it won’t pass a comprehensive national standard when it comes to actually keeping us safe from AI. —SS At least one primarily AI-generated song reaches No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (60 percent) This is the kind of prediction that sounds silly right up until it’s not. Wholly AI-generated music has already crossed one major threshold, when the country track “Walk My Walk,” by the AI band Breaking Rust, topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. One survey found that 60 million people were using AI tools to make music, while the streaming platform Deezer reported that a third of the tracks uploaded each day were AI generated.  The remaining barrier to AI music colonizing your ears isn’t capability so much as distribution: You don’t hit No. 1 because you made a great song — you hit No. 1 because the machinery of attention (TikTok, streaming playlists, fandoms, and labels) decides to make your song unavoidable. And I could see the sheer novelty factor pushing at least one AI generated song to the top of the pops. So what counts as “primarily AI-generated” here? For scoring purposes, I’d define it narrowly: The core musical content (melody/arrangement and a substantial share of the vocals or instrumentation) must be generated by an AI system, and that fact has to be publicly acknowledged by the creators or credibly reported: “AI was used in mastering” or “a producer used AI for a synth patch” — aka AI as a means to supplement human-made work doesn’t count. If it’s essentially an AI-made track with human polishing, it qualifies. Why 60 percent? Because the incentives of novelty, speed and cost all line up. The big uncertainty is backlash: legal, cultural, or platform-level. But history suggests that if something can go viral, it eventually will. —BW Elon Musk will exit the Giving Pledge (55 percent) Musk is on track to become history’s first trillionaire. His fortune is already so gargantuan that if he wanted to, he could end world hunger and subsidize a free national preschool program and still have hundreds of billions of dollars to spare. But don’t bet on it, because the world’s richest man may soon become the first person ever to go take-backsies on the Giving Pledge, a promise by the ultra-wealthy to donate half of their wealth in their lifetime or upon their death. To be fair, plenty of other signatories have quietly died without fulfilling their pledge. But Musk has also drifted far away politically from who he was when he signed in 2012, and his qualms about philanthropy — including that of his fellow pledgers — are no secret. He thinks it is “extremely difficult” to give money well. MacKenzie Scott is “concerning.” Nonprofits are “money laundering” schemes. Philanthropy is “bullshit.” And the pledge’s founder Bill Gates, Musk told his biographer Walter Isaacson, is “categorically insane (and an asshole to the core).” Oh, and his good friend Peter Thiel has been openly encouraging Musk — whose charitable foundation has regularly failed to meet the minimum legal giving requirements anyway — to unsign. Altogether, it’s become more likely than not that Musk will publicly bow out of the Giving Pledge before December 31, 2026. It could come in the form of a quiet delisting on GivingPledge.org, but chances are we’ll find out on X before anywhere else. —SH  There will be a satellite collision in low Earth orbit (75 percent) Space is getting awfully crowded.  About 15,000 satellites currently orbit Earth. That number has risen exponentially in recent years due to megaconstellations, large satellite networks launched by private companies like SpaceX and Amazon to provide broadband internet access around the world. Most of these satellites are in low earth orbit (LEO), or 1,200 miles or less above the planet’s surface. As of late October, there were at least 12,000 active satellites in LEO — and just over 66 percent are a part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which aims to eventually have up to 42,000 satellites.  We’ve launched more satellites to LEO in the last four years than we have in the previous 70 years combined. By 2040, we should expect to see more than 560,000 satellites in orbit based on planned launches. It’s hard to predict exactly how many satellites we’ll have by the end of 2026, but we know that Starlink and other megaconstellations will continue to grow.  The more satellites we have, the greater the chance that they will collide into one another or “space junk” — debris from human-made objects like defunct satellites, bits of spacecrafts, and old rocket parts. Various countries have space traffic management systems to protect against this, but they certainly aren’t fail-safe, especially given the rate at which new satellites are being launched into orbit and the increasing risk of collisions that comes with that.  On December 9, a Starlink satellite narrowly avoided colliding with a Chinese satellite. Space X claimed that the Chinese operator didn’t share its location data. Starlink satellites can automatically change course to avoid objects, but they have to know they’re there for this to work. In the first half of 2025, Starlink performed more than 144,000 avoidance maneuvers. ​​So yes, collisions are inevitable — they’re just a question of when. I’d say 2026. —Shayna Korol Health The US will approve at least one fully synthetic, small-molecule oral GLP-1 receptor agonist for obesity and/or Type 2 diabetes treatment (70 percent) GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are all the rage, but high demand has meant serious shortages. That’s partly because these drugs are complex peptides grown from living cells, a process that’s hard to scale. But that won’t be the case for long. Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company, has developed an oral GLP-1 pill that works like the injections but is structurally very different, more similar to an aspirin. A pill like that would be much cheaper, won’t require cold storage, and can be pressed into pills by the billions. In pivotal trials, the drug showed weight loss rivaling the injections. Lilly is submitting for FDA approval by year’s end, and the drug has been selected for the FDA’s new priority voucher program, which can cut review times from 10 months to as little as two. The government has already struck a deal with Lilly capping Medicare patients’ costs at $50 a month if approved. And CEO Dave Ricks told CNBC he expects a global launch “this time next year.”  Already in late December, the FDA approved a pill version of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. But that’s still a semaglutide, or peptide — not what I’m covering with this prediction. But if Lily’s approval goes through, we’ll be in a true era of GLP-1 abundance. —Pratik Pawar Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still serving as health secretary by the end of the year (60 percent) RFK Jr. has never been a natural fit for the Trump administration. A longtime Democrat with a history of environmental advocacy, he was initially useful to Trump largely because he brought in voters supportive of his Make America Healthy Again movement. But his anti-vaccine advocacy has gotten him into trouble with Republican senators and occasionally put him out of step with Trump, who said in September that “you have some vaccines that are very amazing.” Indeed, if I’d been making this prediction in the fall, I might have given Kennedy less than even odds of staying in his position through 2026. However, he has scored wins lately, like rolling back the federal recommendation that infants receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth (to be clear, experts say getting rid of the recommendation is dangerous and could lead to unnecessary deaths). He has also managed to avoid real political fallout around the release of Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir about their alleged affair. Vaccine skeptics are reportedly excited about their recent victories and looking forward to more. Neither vaccine opposition nor MAHA more generally are truly core to Trump’s governing project, to the extent that he has one, and it’s possible to imagine a post-midterm shakeup of the US Department of Health and Human Services. For now, however, the odds favor Kennedy keeping his job. —AN The World Health Organization will officially withdraw the United States’s measles elimination status (75 percent) The United States earned measles elimination status from the WHO in 2000, after decades of a successful vaccination campaign. More than 90 percent of children received the measles vaccine — and Americans widely agreed on its value. In the following years, with rare exceptions, the only cases in the US were brought here from other parts of the world where measles was still more widespread. Not anymore. Measles vaccination rates have been sliding for years, and 2025 brought the biggest single outbreak in more than three decades, seeded in West Texas among a religious community that is skeptical of vaccinations. Even as that outbreak petered out over the summer, after more than 700 cases and three deaths, local outbreaks have persisted in Utah and South Carolina. The WHO’s criteria for revoking measles elimination status is 12 months of continuous transmission. Considering the same strain of the measles virus that was present in Texas in January was still circulating as of November, it doesn’t look good. It seems to me that only a massive effort from the federal government could stamp out the disease in time — but that appears far less likely than the Kennedy-led health department limiting access to the measles vaccine next year. Instead, it looks like a pretty safe bet that one of the most contagious viruses known to humanity will continue spreading long enough to undo one of the US’s signature public health wins. —Dylan Scott Culture Beyoncé will release a rock album (55 percent)  Not many of my colleagues know this about me, but I’m a huge Beyoncé fan — and how could one not be? She has a voice like honeyed velvet, she can belt like no one else alive, and she can tear through choreo in six-inch heels like she’s just getting warmed up. Her creative instincts have made her one of America’s most consistently admired stars for over two decades, and she’s nothing if not incredibly versatile.  It’s already widely speculated that the third album in Beyoncé’s Renaissance trilogy (the first two being 2022’s Renaissance and 2024’s Cowboy Carter) will be rock ’n’ roll-adjacent, with many reports citing the rock songs she’s already released on Lemonade and her most recent album, plus the numerous rock-coded Easter eggs she’s been dropping over the last year. But she’s also been manifesting a bigger rock project ever since her jaw-dropping backbend set to electric guitar at a 2009 performance of “Freakum Dress,” and probably for even longer.  Her Renaissance trilogy, so far, has explored the Black musical roots of modern pop music, with each release encompassing not a fixed genre but a sonic world with porous borders. So while rock is a narratively satisfying guess for Beyoncé’s next act, there’s also a great deal of uncertainty — she’s rarely straightforward or predictable.   Nevertheless, I’ll place my bets that she’ll have an album out this year with rock or a rock subfield as its primary genre, as defined by at least one major music chart or streaming platform (Billboard, Apple Music, or AllMusic), or as defined by album reviews in a majority of the following outlets: Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Guardian, and Vulture. A tad overconfident? Perhaps. But we could all use a hard cultural pivot from the last few years of country music and aesthetics, and I can’t wait to see what Beyoncé will do as rock frontwoman. —MB  Jacob Elordi will be nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the creature in Frankenstein (70 percent) Oh, Mr. Kissing Booth. I didn’t think you had it in you, but your sorrowful, baby doe eyes as the creature has endeared me! I went to see Frankenstein in IMAX with one of my friends, and I knew that I was going to walk into a monster-sympathetic adaptation. (It’s Guillermo del Toro we’re talking about, he of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.) I’m a big fan of the book, and was eager to see how Elordi would interpret the creature’s curiosity, rage, and desire for love. Elordi’s creature was more than I could have ever hoped for. Elegant, childlike, and grotesque, all wrapped into one lanky 6-foot-6-inch body — a beautiful foil to Oscar Isaac’s impetuous Victor. I entirely forgot this is Nate from Euphoria! And apparently so did everyone at Cannes. He will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but the odds he wins are lower, depending on who from One Battle After Another is nominated, either Benicio del Toro or Sean Penn. If it’s both, Elordi is cooked. —Izzie Ramirez