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Stanford AI Index 2026: AI Agents Perform Only Half as Well as PhD Experts on Complex Scientific Tasks
The 2026 Stanford AI Index Report, covered by Nature, finds that despite rapid adoption, the best AI agents perform only 50% as well as human experts with PhDs on complex scientific tasks. The report documents a paradox: researchers have widely embraced AI agents for autonomous scientific workflows even as objective performance remains substantially below expert-level. 6-9% of all natural-science publications now mention AI, and the report catalogs a wave of new science foundation models trained on domain-specific datasets.
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