Alexander Barry

Alexander Barry

Alexander is the head of the Capabilities Tracking team at Epoch AI. He leads our work on the Epoch Capabilities Index, Benchmark Reviews, and RSI tracking. Prior to joining Epoch he worked as a Statistician.

alexander@epoch.ai

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By Alexander Barry

Open-weight models trail closed models in cyber capabilities by 6–7 months
Data Insight
Oct. 16, 2026
Open-weight models trail closed models in cyber capabilities by 6–7 months

Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 is the top open-weight model on Epoch’s Cyber ECI, scoring where the closed-weight frontier stood 6–7 months earlier.

By Jaeho Lee and Alexander Barry

GPT-6 Astra leads on math benchmarks, but not on software engineering
Data Insight
Sep. 16, 2026
GPT-6 Astra leads on math benchmarks, but not on software engineering

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) with a score of 166, ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 at 164 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 162. Its Math-ECI of 170 sets a new record, but on software engineering benchmarks its SWE-ECI of 164 still lags behind Fable 5.1's 167.

By Alexander Barry and Jaeho Lee

The ECI frontier has advanced by 14 points per year since the introduction of reasoning models
Data Insight
Sep. 1, 2026
The ECI frontier has advanced by 14 points per year since the introduction of reasoning models

By Alexander Barry

OpenAI accidentally hacked Hugging Face — should we have seen it coming?
Newsletter
Jul. 22, 2026
OpenAI accidentally hacked Hugging Face — should we have seen it coming?

Expert assessments and cyber benchmarks led us to expect that frontier models were capable of executing this kind of cyberattack

By Alexander Barry

Are Mythos’ cyber capabilities overhyped?
Newsletter
Jun. 11, 2026
Are Mythos’ cyber capabilities overhyped?

Compiling all the public evidence on Mythos Preview’s cyber abilities

By Timothée Chauvin, Alexander Barry, Jean-Stanislas Denain, and Anson Ho

Claude overperforms at software engineering and underperforms at math
Data Insight
May 15, 2026
Claude overperforms at software engineering and underperforms at math

Relative to their general Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) values, Anthropic’s Claude models overperform on software engineering benchmarks (aggregated by the SWE-ECI) and underperform on math (Math-ECI). The SWE overperformance has been consistent across most generations, and remains in recent models. The math gap may be narrowing — Opus 4.6 and 4.7 both have Math-ECIs within 1 point of their general ECI, compared to larger gaps for earlier models.

By Alexander Barry

Have AI capabilities accelerated?
Report
Apr. 16, 2026
Have AI capabilities accelerated?

We investigate progress trends on four capability metrics to determine whether AI capabilities have recently accelerated. Three of four metrics show strong evidence of acceleration, driven by reasoning models.

By Jean-Stanislas Denain and Alexander Barry