Anthropic's Fable 5.2 completes 41 percent of real freelance jobs, up from 2.5 percent a year ago

On Scale Labs' Real-World Labor Index, Anthropic's Fable 5.2 successfully completes 41.3 percent of 240 real Upwork projects worth about $144,000, up from 2.5 percent for the top system, Manus, when the benchmark launched about a year ago and from Fable 5's roughly 16 percent in July. The next-best systems are Anthropic's Opus 5.5 at 21.25 percent and OpenAI's GPT 6 Astra at 20.83 percent, and Scale Labs says Fable 5.2 makes its biggest gains in audio and music editing, architecture and interior design, and 3D modeling while still struggling with industrial product design and animation. Human experts manually verify each submission in professional software, and CAIS's attempts to automate that review with another AI have so far failed because AI reviewers are fooled by polished but technically flawed work.