By EDDIE PELLS, Associated Press National Writer

DENVER (AP) — Perhaps the surest sign that artificial intelligence really is taking over the world will come the day it wins your favorite March Madness bracket pool.

The day could be coming soon.

In an experiment that a) was bound to happen, b) might actually make us all look smarter and c) should probably also scare the daylights out of everyone, a successful CEO-turned-disruptor is running a $1 million March Madness bracket challenge that pits his AI programmers’ picks against those belonging to one of the world’s best-known sports gamblers.

“We’re not a crystal ball,” says Alan Levy, whose platform, 4C Predictions, is running this challenge. “But it’s going to start to get very, very creepy. In 2025, we’re making a million-dollar bet with a professional sports bettor, and the reason we feel confident to do that is because data, we feel, will beat humans.”

Levy isn’t the only one leveraging AI to help people succeed in America’s favorite pick ’em pool — one that’s become even more lucrative over the past seven years, after a Supreme Court ruling led to the spread of legalized sports betting to 38 states.

ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is hawking its services to help bracket fillers more easily find stats and identify trends. Not surprisingly, it makes no promises.

“With upsets, momentum shifts, and basketball’s inherent unpredictability, consistently creating a perfect bracket may still come down to luck,” said Leah Anise, a spokesperson for OpenAI.

Also making no promises, but trying his hardest, is Sheldon Jacobson, the computer science professor at Illinois who has been trying to build a better bracket through science for years; he might have been AI before AI.

“Nobody predicts the weather,” he explained in an interview back in 2018. “They forecast it using chances and odds.”

$1 million on the line in AI vs. Sean Perry showdown

Levy’s angle is he’s willing to wager $1 million that the AI bracket his company produces can beat that of professional gambler Sean Perry.

Among Perry’s claims to fame was his refusal to accept a four-way split in a pot worth $9.3 million in an NFL survivor pool two years ago. The next week, his pick, the Broncos, lost to New England and he ended up with nothing.

But Perry has wagered and won millions over his career, using heaps of analytics, data and insider information to try to find an edge that, for decades, has been proprietary to casinos and legal sports books, giving them an advantage that allows them to build all those massive hotels.

Levy says his ultimate goal is bring that advantage to the average Joe — either the weekly football bettor who doesn’t have access to reams of data, or the March Madness bracket filler who goes by feel or what team’s mascot he likes best.

“The massive thesis is that the average person are playing games that they can never win, they’re trading stocks where they can never win, they’re trading crypto where they can never win,” Levy said. “4C gives people the chance to empower themselves. It’s a great equalizer. It’s going to level the playing field for everyone.”

But can AI predict the completely unexpected?

It’s one thing to find an edge, quite another to take out every element of chance — every halfcourt game-winner, every 4-point-a-game scorer who goes off for 25, every questionable call by a ref, every St. Peter’s, Yale, FAU or UMBC that rises up and wins for reasons nobody quite understands.

For those who fear AI is leading the world to bad places, Levy reassures us that when it comes to sports, at least, the human element is always the final decider — and humans can do funny and unexpected things.

That’s one of many reasons that, according to the NCAA, there’s a 1 in 120.2 billion chance of a fan with good knowledge of college basketball going 63 for 63 in picking the games. It’s one of many reasons that almost everyone has a story about their 8-year-old niece walking away with the pot because she was the only one who picked George Mason, or North Carolina State, or VCU, to make the Final Four.

“You can’t take the element of fun and luck out of it,” Levy said. “Having said that, as AI develops, it’s going to get creepier and creepier and the predictions are going to get more and more accurate, and it’s all around data sets.”

Levy suggests AI is no three-headed monster, but rather, an advanced version of “Moneyball” — the classic book-turned-movie that followed Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane’s groundbreaking quest to leverage data to build a winning team.

Now, it’s all about putting all that data on steroids, trying to minimize the impact of luck and glass slippers, and building a winning bracket.

“We’ve got to understand that this technology is meant to augment us,” Levy said. “It’s meant to make our lives better. So, let’s encourage people to use it, and even if it’s creepy, at least it’s creepy on our side.”

The AI’s side in this one: Houston to win it all. Perry, the gambler, is going with Duke.

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By ALEX TURNBULL and SUMAN NAISHADHAM, Associated Press

CHAMPAGNE, France (AP) — Across wine country in France, Italy and Spain one number is top of mind: 200%.

That’s because last week U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a tariff of that amount on European wine, Champagne and other spirits if the European Union went ahead with retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. products. The top wine producers in Europe could face crippling costs that would hit smaller wineries especially hard.

Europe’s wine industry is the latest to find itself in the crosshairs of a possible trade spat with the U.S.

Bottles Champagne are for sale at a wine dealer shop as President Donald Trump threatened a 200% tariff on European wine, Champagne and spirits if the European Union goes forward with a planned tariff on American whiskey, Thursday, March 13, 2025 in Ville d’Avray, outside Paris. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Among those concerned is David Levasseur, a third-generation wine grower and owner of a Champagne house in France’s eponymous region.

“It means I’m in trouble, big trouble. We hope it’s just, as we say, blah blah,” Levasseur said, standing in his Champagne house as he swilled a flute of his vineyard’s bubbly. “When someone speaks so loudly,” he said of Trump’s 200% threat, “it’s about the media buzz. But in any case, we think there will be consequences.”

Like other wine sellers and exporters, Levasseur said that a 200% tariff on what he exports to the U.S. would essentially grind to a halt his business in that country.

“It could be a real disaster,” Levasseur said.

Italy, France and Spain are among the top five exporters of wine to the United States. Trump made his threat to Europe’s alcohol industry after the European Union announced a 50% tax on American whiskey expected to take effect on April 1. That duty was unveiled in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.

In France, a 4 billion euro market

Gabriel Picard, who heads the French Federation of Exporters of Wines and Spirits, said 200% tariffs would be “a hammer blow” for France’s industry, whose wine and spirits exports to the U.S. are worth $4.3 billion annually.

“With 200% duties, there is no more market,” Picard said.

A glass of champagne is seen at the wine making facility of wine grower David Levasseur in Cuchery, eastern France, Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Still, he understood why European leaders responded to Trump’s initial tariffs.

“There’s no debate about that. We agree that Mr. Trump creates and likes to create contests of strength. We have to adapt to that,” he said.

For Italy, it’s the wine at high-end restaurants they worry most about losing

In Italy, the wine industry has called for calm, hoping that negotiators in Brussels and Washington can back down from the growing trade spat.

The U.S. is Italy’s largest wine market, with sales having tripled in value over the past 20 years. Last year, exports grew by nearly 7% to over $2.2 billion according to Italy’s main farming lobby Coldiretti.

Strong sales at high-end restaurants, in particular, make the U.S. market difficult to replace, said Piero Mastroberardino, vice president of the national winemakers’ association Federvini.

Mastroberardino’s “Taurasi Radici” red wine, for example, was rated the fifth-best wine in the world in 2023 by Wine Spectator, an American wine and lifestyle magazine. It sells for around $80 a bottle retail in the U.S., roughly twice how much it costs in Italy, so any tariffs would push it to an “unthinkable price point,” he said.

In January, Mastroberardino’s U.S. import partners increased orders by about 20% in January anticipating possible Trump tariffs. But the increase in orders would not offset the impact of tariffs, particularly that high, he said, for long.

“It is in everyone’s interest to maintain a united front at the negotiating table,” Mastroberardino said, “especially those who are being targeted.”

Smooth reds from Spain, as well as bubbly Cava

Wine producers and industry experts in Spain, whose smooth reds are savored by tens of millions of American tourists who visit the southern European country every year, shared similar concerns about prospective tariffs.

“We don’t think they have much logic and we hope it never comes to fruition,” said Begoña Olavarría, an economic analyst at the Interprofessional Wine Organization of Spain.

Spain was the fourth-largest exporter of wine to the U.S. last year in sales, and the seventh-largest by volume, according to the trade group. Spanish wine exports to the U.S. grew by 7% last year. And the wine industry represents about 2% of the country’s overall economic output, the trade group said.

For Spain’s producers of Cava, the threat of U.S. tariffs hit especially hard. The U.S. is the number two market for the Spanish bubbly wine, which like Champagne has a designation of origin meaning it can only be made in Spain.

Mireia Pujol-Busquets is owner of the Alta Alella Bodega located in Cava country just south of Barcelona. Founded by her family in 1991, she said her business and its 40 employees immediately risk losing sales of some 25,000 bottles if the American market slams shut.

“We spent 10 years of effort opening the American market, finding distributors and building a brand,” she told the AP.

While the Catalan bodega and its distributors in the U.S. were able to absorb the price increase induced by Trump’s 25% tariff on wines during his first term, Pujol-Busquets said that it is “completely irrational” to consider eating a 200% hike.

“The situation is pretty desperate,” she said.

Naishadham reported from Madrid. Associated Press journalists Joseph Wilson in Barcelona, Spain; John Leicester in Paris; and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.