NatureBench: Coding agents surpass published SOTA on only 17.8% of real scientific tasks from Nature-family papers
NatureBench introduces a 90-task benchmark derived from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications to evaluate whether AI coding agents can advance beyond reproduction toward genuine scientific discovery. Built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that creates containerized per-task environments, the benchmark addresses environment fragmentation that has undermined prior agent-on-research evaluations. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a web-search-disabled protocol, the strongest model exceeds published SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks, with failures driven primarily by wrong method choice and insufficient compute rather than task misunderstanding. Agents succeed mainly through methodological translation—recasting scientific problems as supervised prediction—rather than genuine scientific invention.
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TxBench-PP: New benchmark reveals AI agents struggle with preclinical pharmacology decisions
Researchers introduce TxBench-PP (TherapeuticsBench Preclinical Pharmacology), a 100-evaluation benchmark testing AI agents on realistic small-molecule drug discovery tasks including mechanism-of-action reasoning, compound-target engagement, and translational efficacy. Agents receive real workflow snapshots and are graded deterministically on structured answers. Across 16 model-harness configurations and 4,800 trajectories, no system reliably succeeded; the best performer, Claude Opus 4.8 with the Pi harness, passed only 59.3% of endpoint attempts. The results suggest current frontier models are not yet deployment-ready for autonomous preclinical pharmacology decision-making.
PseudoBench: Benchmark reveals agentic AI research systems readily produce pseudoscientific outputs
PseudoBench is a new adversarial benchmark evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives, containing 200 curated claim-evidence pairs across five domains. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, the authors find near-zero refusal rates and a maximum resistance rate of only 27.4%, meaning current systems readily generate persuasive pseudoscientific reports. A notable finding is that stronger agents package pseudoscience in more sophisticated language, increasing its apparent credibility rather than reducing harm. The authors call for 'scientific alignment' as a prerequisite for deploying autonomous research agents.
PaperBench: OpenAI Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Research Replication
OpenAI introduces PaperBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents' ability to replicate state-of-the-art AI research papers end-to-end. The benchmark targets a high-complexity capability: reproducing experimental results from frontier AI research, which requires code generation, experimental design, and scientific reasoning. This positions PaperBench as a tool for tracking progress toward autonomous AI research agents.
DeepSWE, ProgramBench, and ITBench-AA emerge as harder successors to SWE-bench for agent evaluation
Three new benchmarks — DeepSWE (by Datacurve), ProgramBench (Meta/Stanford/Harvard), and ITBench-AA (IBM/Artificial Analysis) — are positioned as more rigorous replacements for the SWE-bench family, which models have largely saturated. DeepSWE tests feature implementation using private codebases and human-written problems; ProgramBench evaluates agents' ability to recreate functional programs from scratch; ITBench-AA measures root-cause diagnosis in real-world IT incident scenarios. Current top performers include GPT-5.5 (70% on DeepSWE), Claude Opus 4.7 (46.7% on ITBench-AA), and Claude Opus 4.7 (3% on ProgramBench at the 95% pass threshold), illustrating that even frontier models have substantial headroom.
Benchmark Agent: Autonomous system for end-to-end benchmark construction
Researchers introduce Benchmark Agent, a fully autonomous agentic system that orchestrates the complete benchmark construction pipeline — from query analysis and subtask design to data annotation and quality control. The system was used to produce 15 benchmarks spanning text understanding, multimodal understanding, and domain-specific reasoning, with evaluation via human judges, LLM-as-a-judge, and consistency checks. The work addresses two persistent problems in the field: the labor intensity of benchmark creation and rapid performance saturation after release. Code and a demo will be publicly released.
AARRI-Bench evaluates frontier LLMs and agents on granular research-intern-level tasks
Researchers introduce AARR (Act As a Real Researcher), a new benchmark series targeting whether AI agents can emulate the professionalism, thoroughness, and nuanced judgment of human researchers in granular research scenarios—not just macro-level task execution. The first benchmark, AARRI-Bench, tests frontier models and agentic harnesses, finding that even the best configuration (Mini-SWE-Agent with Claude Opus 4.7) achieves only 68.3% success, frequently missing subtle but critical details obvious to human researchers. The work argues that closing the gap requires deeper modeling of research behavior rather than more complex scaffolding.
SWE-Explore: New benchmark isolates repository exploration capability in coding agents
SWE-Explore is a new benchmark targeting repository exploration as a distinct, fine-grained capability of coding agents, separate from end-to-end task resolution. It covers 848 issues across 10 programming languages and 203 open-source repositories, with line-level ground truth derived from successful agent trajectories. Evaluation across retrieval methods, coding agents, and specialized localizers finds that agentic explorers outperform classical retrieval, and that line-level coverage and efficient ranking remain the key differentiators at the frontier. The benchmark addresses a gap in SWE-bench-style evaluations that treat task resolution as a binary outcome.
ABC-Bench: Agentic biosecurity benchmark finds LLM agents surpass median expert humans on dual-use biology tasks
Researchers introduce ABC-Bench, a benchmark evaluating LLM agents on biosecurity-relevant biology tasks including liquid-handling robot programming, DNA fragment design, and evasion of DNA synthesis screening. All tested agents outperformed the median expert human baseline across all three tasks. Wet-lab validation confirmed that OpenAI's o4-mini-high produced scripts that successfully assembled DNA on an OpenTrons robot. The results highlight a meaningful shift in the biosecurity risk landscape as AI agents acquire practical wet-lab-adjacent capabilities.