FrontierCS 2
Agents work inside the released repository of a recent systems or programming-languages paper and try to beat that paper's method. A hidden held-out suite grades the final patch against the human reference.
48 of a planned 150 tasks released across 13 domains. The maker says FrontierCS 2 asks a different question from FrontierCS 1.0, so scores are not comparable.
In the authors’ words
Can LLM agents make contributions to frontier computer science R&D? We introduce FrontierCS 2, a benchmark of 48 open-ended tasks. We take a paper and the code its authors released and delete the paper's contribution. The deleted code becomes the human reference that sets the bar. Earlier open-ended benchmarks give each agent a problem statement and grade one program after the run. FrontierCS 2 places the agent inside a research environment. The agent inherits a working repository and may submit a patch at any point. For each patch, a judge returns a development-suite score but keeps the evaluator, the held-out final suite and the reference private, and grades the final submission on that suite against the reference. The tasks span 13 domains, from machine-learning systems and high-performance computing to databases, security and robotics. Beyond these 48 tasks, FrontierCS 2 keeps a private set of more than 100 tasks, to be announced in the future. We evaluate 12 agents. The best one is Claude Opus 5.5, passing 58% of its runs. No run passes on 16 tasks. A higher score is not the same as a pass: most runs that beat the reference on the combined final score still fall short on some metric or workload. On a shared capability scale for agents and tasks, the median task is roughly as difficult as what the strongest agent can handle.
- Level
- Research frontier Researchers, on open problems or tasks that take days
- Scored
- Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
- Answers
- Agent task Many steps in a terminal, browser, desktop, app, game or robot.
Claude Opus 5.5 leads with 58.3%
Best score per model from the benchmark's own leaderboard, read on 2 Nov 2026. Where a model ran with several settings or harnesses, we keep its best.
- 58.3 Claude Opus 5.5
- 54.2
Gemini 4 Argon
- 54.2
Gemini 4 Carbon
- 43.8 GPT-6 Astra
- 39.6 GPT-6.1 Terra
- 37.5 Claude Fable 5.1
- 35.4 GPT-6.1 Sol
- 25.0 GLM-5.3
- 20.8 Kimi K3
- 20.8
Muse Wonder
- 16.7
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
- 14.6
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
- 12.5
Qwen 3.8 Max
- 12.5 GLM-5.3-Flash
- 12.5
Muse Spark 1.3
- 8.33
Step 5 Preview
- 1 Claude Opus 5.5 58.3%
- 2
Gemini 4 Argon 54.2%
- 3
Gemini 4 Carbon 54.2%
- 4 GPT-6 Astra 43.8%
- 5 GPT-6.1 Terra 39.6%
- 6 Claude Fable 5.1 37.5%
- 7 GPT-6.1 Sol 35.4%
- 8 GLM-5.3 25%
- 9 Kimi K3 20.8%
- 10
Muse Wonder 20.8%
- 11
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 16.7%
- 12
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 14.6%
- 13
Qwen 3.8 Max 12.5%
- 14 GLM-5.3-Flash 12.5%
- 15
Muse Spark 1.3 12.5%
- 16
Step 5 Preview 8.33%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 5.5 | 58.3% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 2 | | 54.2% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 3 | | 54.2% | Oct 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 4 | GPT-6 Astra | 43.8% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 5 | GPT-6.1 Terra | 39.6% | Oct 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 6 | Claude Fable 5.1 | 37.5% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 7 | GPT-6.1 Sol | 35.4% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 8 | GLM-5.3 | 25% | Aug 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 9 | Kimi K3 | 20.8% | Jul 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 10 | | 20.8% | Oct 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 11 | | 16.7% | Oct 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 12 | | 14.6% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 13 | | 12.5% | Aug 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 14 | GLM-5.3-Flash | 12.5% | Aug 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 15 | | 12.5% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard | |
| 16 | | 8.33% | Sep 2026 | Official leaderboard |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
No lab model card reports it yet
We read the headline results of 479 launch posts from 51 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.
Versions
More in AI research
- MLS-Bench In use Agent must invent one algorithmic change in an ML research scaffold whose gain transfers across settings. Scored relative to human baselines. Claude Fable 5.1 50.3%
- PaperBench In use Agent replicates ICML 2024 papers from scratch. LLM judge grades against author-written hierarchical rubrics.
Qwen 3.8 Max 93%
- MLE-bench In use Kaggle-style ML engineering competitions. Agent trains models and is scored against competition leaderboards. GPT-6 Astra 93.8%
- PostTrainBench 1.2 In use CLI agent gets a base model, one H100 and a time budget to post-train it for a target benchmark. Scored on normalized gain. Claude Fable 5.1 44.6%
- KernelBench In use Replace PyTorch operators with faster custom GPU kernels. Scored on correctness and speedup.
MiniMax-M3 28.8%
- OpenAI PRs Only in system cards Agents replicate internal OpenAI pull requests from a pre-PR branch and a prompt. Graded by hidden unit tests as pass@1. GPT-5.2 55%