This brief guide will apply to Time Attack, as well as Arcade Mode at Medium difficulty. Easy and Hard difficulties will vary.

Manipulating the AI and being able to accurately guess what the AI will do is an incredibly important strategy that can greatly benefit your run. Although you can't know exactly what the AI will perform, learning the AI's general pattern, especially ways that they get up off of the floor and when they attempt to attack you, can allow you to plan and test tactics optimally and then use them in runs.

At least on Medium difficulty, the AI will progressively get harder the further along you get. Below are the four exact different 'modes' that the AI behaves in and which stages these behaviours appear in.

Stages 1-3: The AI will very rarely block, if ever. The AI also won't react to strings, 10 hit combos and won't break throws. The AI isn't especially aggressive, and will most often stand straight up or roll backwards when knocked down. Set-ups such as Gun Jack's f+2, f+4~1 can be used as the AI is slow to react and won't immediately knock you out of things like unblockables.

Stages 4-5: The AI will now block more. The AI will also block lows and duck highs in strings (e.g. Hwoarang's RFF f+3,3,3,3), as well as 10 hit combos, and will almost always duck underneath or back away from throws, meaning now you have to set throws up if you want to use them. The AI will also tech roll, but only occasionally. The AI has slightly faster reaction times, but the aforementioned Gun Jack set-up and others will still work.

Stages 6-7: The AI now blocks a lot more and also becomes more aggressive and smarter. They will also immediately hit you out of almost all unblockables now. While some set-ups won't work, the AI's tendency to tech roll can be exploited by set-ups such as Ogre's u/f+4, 2, b+2+3 tech roll catch. However, these set-ups can be inconsistent.

Stages 8-10: The AI now becomes even more aggressive and smarter. While before the AI could dodge things like throws and not fall for strings, now the AI is smart enough that it can counter your moves before you even perform them, e.g. when fighting against Heihachi, he may perform u/f+3,4 when you're attempting to hit him with a low attack, jumping over (low crushing) your attack to hit you. On the plus side, the AI will now tech roll almost all the time, making set-ups such as the aforementioned Ogre set-up a lot more consistent.

Some tactics will work against every form of AI, such as Heihachi's WGF, fF+1, fF+1, fF+1, d+1+4 set-up where the AI will always tech roll, but in other cases you need to know the most common behaviour of the computer opponent you're fighting against on that stage, to know exactly how to manipulate them. Since the whole goal of Tekken speedruns is to beat all your opponents as quickly as possible, if you can manipulate the 'AI RNG' into reacting exactly how you want it to, you've already won half the battle!