Benchmark Almanac

SimpleQA Hallucination Rate

ChatGPT agent 7.90% leads since Jul 2025 Dropped

Models answer 4,326 short fact-seeking questions. This metric is the share of questions answered incorrectly, so declining to answer is not penalized.

Google DeepMind later released SimpleQA Verified, a cleaned 1,000-question version.

In the authors’ words

We present SimpleQA, a benchmark that evaluates the ability of language models to answer short, fact-seeking questions. We prioritized two properties in designing this eval. First, SimpleQA is challenging, as it is adversarially collected against GPT-4 responses. Second, responses are easy to grade, because questions are created such that there exists only a single, indisputable answer. Each answer in SimpleQA is graded as either correct, incorrect, or not attempted. A model with ideal behavior would get as many questions correct as possible while not attempting the questions for which it is not confident it knows the correct answer. SimpleQA is a simple, targeted evaluation for whether models "know what they know," and our hope is that this benchmark will remain relevant for the next few generations of frontier models. SimpleQA can be found at https://github.com/openai/simple-evals.

Abstract of Measuring short-form factuality in large language models (arXiv:2411.04368, CC0)
Made by OpenAI Released Oct 2024 Hallucination rates All tasks public Last in a launch post Feb 2025 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Oct 2025
Scored
Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
Answers
Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
12
Models scored in lab cards
1
Launch post lists it, from 1 lab
12
System cards report it, from 1 lab

ChatGPT agent leads with 7.90% among models released by Aug 2025

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

The newest model with a score here came out in Aug 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 ChatGPT agent 7.90%
  2. 2 GPT-5 mini 26%
  3. 3 GPT-5 nano 31%
  4. 4 GPT-4.5 37.1%
  5. 5 GPT-5 40%
  6. 6 o1-preview 44%
  7. 7 o1 44%
  8. 8 o3 51%
  9. 9 o1-mini 60%
  10. 10 gpt-oss-120b 78.2%
  11. 11 o4-mini 79%
  12. 12 gpt-oss-20b 91.4%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 ChatGPT agent 7.90% Jul 2025 Model card
2 GPT-5 mini 26% Aug 2025 Model card
3 GPT-5 nano 31% Aug 2025 Model card
4 GPT-4.5 37.1% Feb 2025 Model card
5 GPT-5 40% Aug 2025 Model card
6 o1-preview 44% Sep 2024 Model card
7 o1 44% Dec 2024 Model card
8 o3 51% Apr 2025 Model card
9 o1-mini 60% Sep 2024 Model card
10 gpt-oss-120b 78.2% Aug 2025 Model card
11 o4-mini 79% Apr 2025 Model card
12 gpt-oss-20b 91.4% Aug 2025 Model card

3 models have held number one since its release in Oct 2024

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

OpenAI
Lab claims Not tested since Oct 2025

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 2026 ChatGPT agent GPT-4.5 o1-preview o1-mini 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 2026 ChatGPT agent GPT-4.5

No launch post has listed it since Feb 2025

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

OpenAI
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
27 Feb 2025 GPT-4.5 37.1 SimpleQA Hallucination Rate (lower is better)

12 system cards report it, from 1 lab

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
27 Oct 2025 GPT-5 system card addendum 52 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, gpt-5-oct-3 (Table 4) Hallucination
7 Aug 2025 GPT-5 system card 40 SimpleQA (no web), hallucination rate (Table 8) Hallucination
7 Aug 2025 GPT-5 nano system card 31 SimpleQA (no web), hallucination rate, gpt-5-thinking-nano (Table 8) Hallucination
7 Aug 2025 GPT-5 mini system card 26 SimpleQA (no web), hallucination rate, gpt-5-thinking-mini (Table 8) Hallucination
5 Aug 2025 gpt-oss-20b model card 91.4 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, no browsing (Table 9) Hallucination
5 Aug 2025 gpt-oss-120b model card 78.2 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, no browsing (Table 9) Hallucination
17 Jul 2025 ChatGPT agent system card 7.9 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 4) Hallucination
16 Apr 2025 o4-mini system card 79 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 4) Hallucination
16 Apr 2025 o3 system card 51 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 4) Hallucination
5 Dec 2024 o1 system card 44 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 3) Hallucination
12 Sep 2024 o1-preview system card 44 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 2) Hallucination
12 Sep 2024 o1-mini system card 60 SimpleQA, hallucination rate, lower is better (Table 2) Hallucination

More in Factuality

All 70 in Factuality
  • SimpleVQA In use Models answer 2,025 short factual questions about images across 9 tasks and 9 topics. An LLM judge grades answers against fixed references. Qwen3.7-Plus 81.7%
  • HallusionBench In use Models answer 1,129 yes or no questions about 346 images, built in pairs to expose language hallucination and visual illusion. Scored by accuracy. Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B 73.5%
  • SimpleQA Verified In use 1,000 human-verified, de-duplicated short-answer factual questions measuring parametric knowledge. Gemini 3.1 Pro 77.5%
  • GaRAGe In use Models write long-form RAG answers to 2,366 questions with human-annotated grounding passages. Scoring checks whether answers use the relevant passages. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 40.7%
  • Kimi Hallu Bench In use Models answer hard prompts drawn from practical work tasks. Fact-checking agents score the share of claims that are hallucinated. Kimi K3.1 Pro 8.30%
  • RAGTruth In use A word-level annotated corpus of hallucinations in retrieval-augmented generation answers. It is used to train and evaluate hallucination detection and RAG faithfulness. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 77.9%