Open-World Evaluations for Measuring Frontier AI Capabilities

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 19 May 2026] Open-World Evaluations for Measuring Frontier AI Capabilities Sayash Kapoor, Peter Kirgis, Andrew Schwartz, Stephan Rabanser, J.J. Allaire, Rishi Bommasani, Harry Coppock, Magda Dubois, Gillian K Hadfield, Andrew B. Hall, Sara Hooker, Seth Lazar, Steve Newman, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Shoshannah Tekofsky, Helen Toner, Cozmin Ududec, Arvind Narayanan Benchmark-based evaluation remains important for tracking frontier AI progress. But it can both overstate and understate deployed capability because it privileges tasks that can be precisely specified, automatically graded, easy to optimize for, and run with low budgets and short time horizons. We advocate for a complementary class of evaluations, which we term open-world evaluations: long-horizon, messy, real-world tasks assessed through small-sample qualitative analysis rather than benchmark-scale automation. In this paper we survey recent open-world evaluations, identify their strengths and limitations, and introduce CRUX (Collaborative Research for Updating AI eXpectations), a project for conducting such evaluations regularly. As a first instance, we task an AI agent with developing and publishing a simple iOS application to the Apple App Store. The agent completed the task with only a single avoidable manual intervention, suggesting that open-world evaluations can provide early warning of capabilities that may soon become widespread. We conclude with recommendations for designing and reporting open-world evals. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.20520 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.20520v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20520 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Stephan Rabanser [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 21:42:32 UTC (1,131 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)