In plain words: A new test gives AI agents 480 realistic long jobs built by bankers, consultants, and lawyers, requiring them to work across files and tools in real-looking offices. The best agent finished 24% of tasks on its first attempt.
Abstract · APEX-Agents
We introduce the AI Productivity Index for Agents (APEX-Agents), a benchmark for assessing whether AI agents can execute long-horizon, cross-application tasks created by investment banking analysts, management consultants, and corporate lawyers. APEX-Agents requires agents to navigate realistic work environments with files and tools. We test eight agents for the leaderboard using Pass@1. Gemini 3 Flash (Thinking=High) achieves the highest score of 24.0%, followed by GPT-5.2 (Thinking=High), Claude Opus 4.5 (Thinking=High), and Gemini 3 Pro (Thinking=High). We open source the APEX-Agents benchmark (n=480) with all prompts, rubrics, gold outputs, files, and metadata. We also open source Archipelago, our infrastructure for agent execution and evaluation.
Bertie Vidgen, Austin Mann, Abby Fennelly, John Wright Stanly, Lucas Rothman, Marco Burstein, Julien Benchek, David Ostrofsky, Anirudh Ravichandran, Debnil Sur, Neel Venugopal, Alannah Hsia, et al.
arXiv:2601.14242 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jan 20, 2026 · updated Feb 23, 2026
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