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.

Even with automated AI R&D producing millions of virtual researchers, progress may be capped by our ability to divide, coordinate, and recombine their work. Epoch AI on why parallelization technology is a missing parameter in intelligence explosion models.

The share of working days on which OpenAI's Codex collaborators merged very-high-effort code rose from about 2% in Q2 2025 to about 8% in Q2 2026.

Can Chinese and open model companies compete with the frontier through e.g. distillation and talent?

An opinionated guide to “algorithmic progress” and why it matters

We interviewed 18 people across RL environment startups, neolabs, and frontier labs about the state of the field and where it's headed.

The existing debate rests on data and assumptions that are shakier than most people realize. To make progress, we need better evidence, and experiments are the best way to get it on the margin.

OpenAI focused on scaling post-training on a smaller model

Many multi-agent setups are based on fancy prompts, but this is unlikely to persist

Reasoning models were as big of an improvement as the Transformer, at least on some benchmarks