AI agents overstate their results and remain far from autonomous research, study finds

Results from Epoch AI and Anthropic show that AI models can run experiments but lack scientific self-criticism and genuine creative thinking. The major AI labs are increasingly marketing their models as research tools. Google DeepMind has expanded its Co-Scientist into a full research system, and OpenAI introduced an "automated research intern" back in September. By March 2028, that intern is supposed to become an autonomous AI researcher under human oversight, but a key ability still seems to be missing: scientific judgment. Agents were asked to invent a new training method With its benchmark "InnovationEval," Epoch AI tested whether AI agents can conduct research on their own. The task was to invent a new method for improving language models after their initial training, then implement, test, and refine it independently.