AI capabilities

AI systems can now write code, pass professional exams, and assist with scientific research, and their capabilities are improving remarkably fast. But measuring exactly what AI can and cannot do is genuinely difficult, with benchmarks struggling to keep pace and real-world performance often diverging from test scores. Epoch tracks AI capabilities across tasks and benchmarks, examining how fast progress is happening, how predictable it is, and what it reveals about where the technology is heading.

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AI Benchmarks & Capabilities
Updated Sep. 25, 2026
AI Benchmarks & Capabilities

Our hub for benchmark results, featuring the performance of leading AI models on challenging tasks. It includes results from benchmarks administered internally by Epoch AI as well as data collected from external sources. Explore trends in AI capabilities across time, by benchmark, or by model.

Can AI spot mistakes in IKEA assembly?
Report
Sep. 23, 2026
Can AI spot mistakes in IKEA assembly?

AI model scores on Epoch AI's IKEA furniture assembly benchmark jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months, with open-weight models trailing closed-weight models by about 7 months. Epoch AI's test of visual and spatial reasoning across 60 photos from three furniture builds.

By Aiden Ament and Greg Burnham

The plunging price of thought
Report
Sep. 22, 2026
The plunging price of thought

Epoch AI measures how fast the cost of a given level of AI performance is falling across five benchmarks covering math, science and games of skill: about 47% per quarter, or 13x per year, since 2023, faster than electricity, compute, batteries or DNA sequencing ever fell.

By Luke Emberson and David Roodman

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

Announcing FrontierMath Erdős
Update
Sep. 1, 2026
Announcing FrontierMath Erdős

A benchmark of 68 significant Erdős problems, open as of August 2026, curated by Thomas Bloom and formalized in Lean. AI systems must prove or disprove them within a fixed budget.

By Tom Adamczewski and Greg Burnham

9 big questions benchmarks can help answer
Newsletter
Aug. 14, 2026
9 big questions benchmarks can help answer

A good benchmark asks more than just “can AI do this specific task?”

By Greg Burnham

Disclosed CVEs: July Reached 5× the Pre-Mythos Record
Data Insight
Jul. 31, 2026
Disclosed CVEs: July Reached 5× the Pre-Mythos Record

Notable organizations disclosed ~2,500 high- and critical-severity CVEs in July 2026, about 5× the pre-Mythos monthly record. Epoch AI's updated breakdown of vulnerability disclosures following Anthropic's Project Glasswing.

By Luke Emberson

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

AI detectors rarely flag human writing, but sometimes miss AI text imitating real authors
Data Insight
Jul. 15, 2026
AI detectors rarely flag human writing, but sometimes miss AI text imitating real authors

We tested Pangram, GPTZero, and Originality.ai on human and AI text. All three caught nearly every passage written from a simple prompt, but missed roughly one in five passages imitating a specific author's style.

By Jaeho Lee