Hey readers, Bryan Walsh here. How was your New Year's? 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.
Here are our (abridged) predictions for 2026. Check out the full list here. |
The US falls from the ranks of liberal democracies, but remains an electoral democracy (60 percent) Entering 2026, assessing the health of American democracy is a bit of a puzzle. 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. 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, senior correspondent
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. 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. —Anna North, senior correspondent 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. 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, senior correspondent |
Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images |
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. 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, senior correspondent
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. 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). —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor |
Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images |
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, senior reporter 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 Check out the rest of our 2026 predictions here. |
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In 2026, I'm in the mood for... |
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Today's edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. See you next week! |
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