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Agents' Last Exam (arxiv.org)
2 points by matt_d 115 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Unlike short benchmark quizzes, this test gives AI agents long, real-world work tasks with outcomes that can be checked, built with 250+ experts across 13 industry groups. On the hardest tier, agents fully complete under 1% of tasks on average.

Abstract

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

Yiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang, Yuanbo Pang, Tianyu Wang, Yuhan Cao, Yixiao Huang, Chris Duroiu, Haoyun Zhang, Jeffrey Lin, Weishu Zhang, Tyler Zeng, et al.
arXiv:2606.05405 · cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jun 3, 2026 · updated Jun 11, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Project website: https://agents-last-exam.org Code: https://github.com/rdi-berkeley/agents-last-exam

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