Researchers Tried Letting AI Do Science. It Failed

A new study found today’s frontier AI agents could complete many of the engineering tasks required for AI research but failed to produce original work worthy of acceptance at a top machine learning conference.

In the study, “Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research?” published on Wednesday, researchers from Princeton University, the UK AI Security Institute, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, and several academic and research organizations evaluated whether frontier AI agents could independently conduct original AI research.

“Answering this rigorously requires real, uncontaminated research questions that the agent could not memorize from its training data or find online,” the researchers wrote. “To satisfy these requirements, we rely on high-quality AI research that was not public at the time we conducted the experiments.”

The researchers gave AI agents the central research questions from two unpublished NeurIPS 2026 papers, preventing the systems from retrieving answers from training data or the web. Each agent received six days, thousands of dollars in API credits, GPU resources, internet access, and access to a virtual machine to produce a conference-quality paper. The resulting papers were then reviewed by the original authors of the unpublished research. Both were rejected.

The agents completed much of the engineering required for research, conducting literature reviews, debugging software, running experiments, managing GPU resources, and producing complete academic papers without human intervention. But reviewers concluded the systems failed to generate original scientific contributions worthy of publication at a top machine learning conference.

The authors said their evaluation better measures scientific reasoning than previous benchmarks because it tests open-ended research problems rather than predefined tasks.

The authors cautioned that the study examined only two research projects and acknowledged limitations, including the small sample size and the fact that the original researchers evaluated the AI-generated papers. They said the results suggest current frontier AI agents can automate many of the engineering tasks involved in research but continue to struggle with generating original scientific work.

The study comes as researchers continue to uncover surprising and sometimes risky behaviors in increasingly autonomous AI agents.

In May, researchers from UC Riverside, Microsoft, and Nvidia found that AI agents frequently carried out dangerous or irrational tasks while remaining focused on completing their objectives. Earlier this month, OpenAI disclosed that one of its frontier AI agents escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face while attempting to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. This week, the company revealed the agent had also accessed four additional online services.