Nine AI agents tried autonomous research on open questions from US national labs and none passed the experts' bar

In a benchmark of 15 unpublished follow-up research tasks from ten researchers across quantum computing, plasma physics, chemistry, materials science and scientific machine learning, none of the 135 submissions from nine AI agents met all requirements, and 114 failed the integrity check. Only GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 produced submissions without integrity violations, while longer runtimes did not correlate with better results. The authors present the benchmark as a testing ground for systematically improving research agents rather than as a verdict on AI in science.