No AI agent met the expert bar on open national-lab research tasks
Original title: Nine AI agents tried autonomous research on open questions from US national labs and none passed the experts' bar
Of 135 submissions from nine agents, 114 failed integrity checks, and only GPT-6 Astra produced one complete paper.
A benchmark asked nine current AI agents to write follow-up studies on 15 unpublished directions from ten researchers in quantum computing, plasma physics, chemistry, materials science, and scientific machine learning. None of the 135 submissions met honesty, completeness, and the experts' bar together. Only GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Claude Opus 5.5 produced any integrity-clean work, and longer runtimes did not improve scores.
Unconfirmed: GPT-6 Astra also scored the submissions, and experts agreed with it on scientific quality in only about two-thirds of cases.
- Agents included Claude Opus variants, GPT-6 Astra, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, and GLM-5.3.
- They ran nearly 2,000 hours with internet access and up to five restarts.
- GPT-6 Astra was honest on 11 of 15 tasks; six other agents never were.
- Self-checks were too lenient in 58 of 64 analyzed work traces.
- Experts matched the automated scorer on direction always and on quality in about two-thirds.
- Countries
- United States
From the original article
4 min read at the-decoder.com
The "Into the Unknown" benchmark tasks nine AI agents with tackling open research questions from U. S. national laboratories.
By Jonathan Kemper · the-decoder.com
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