Open-weight models trail closed models in cyber capabilities by 6–7 months
Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 is the top open-weight model on Epoch’s Cyber ECI, scoring where the closed-weight frontier stood 6–7 months earlier.
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AI systems are improving rapidly at Slay the Spire and its sequel
Months ago, frontier models could barely beat Slay the Spire. Now they win 90%+ at the easiest setting and up to 20% at the hardest. Results from Epoch AI’s new SpireClimb benchmark.
Can AI automate Epoch?
Frontier models can handle well-defined tasks reliably, but fail in the more open-ended aspects that prevent full work automation. Explore Epoch AI's Automation Reports: realistic, open-ended tasks taken directly from our work, manually graded by our own standards.
US adults are no more likely to face cyber incidents than when Claude Fable 5 launched
June and September polls from Epoch AI/Ipsos show no detectable increase in the share of US adults experiencing cyber incidents
EBR-bench update
Updates on EBR-bench, Epoch AI’s benchmark that tests models’ ability to learn from experience. GPT-6 Astra hit a perfect score on over half its EBR-bench attempts by exploiting one overpowered card, which we now ban. Plus multi-agent scaffold results.
Can AI automate AI R&D yet?
Early evidence from InnovationEval: No
China is more exposed to semiconductor supply-chain disruptions than the US
China is 2.7× as exposed to semiconductor supply shocks as the US, Epoch AI estimates. Epoch traces chips through input-output tables to model the impact of a Taiwan shock and decoupling.
How do Chinese AI companies make money?
China's six leading AI firms earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined AI revenue. Epoch AI examines their five revenue streams: consumer apps, model access, enterprise and government solutions, licensing fees, and indirect monetization through cloud and advertising.
Coding-agent spending by OpenAI researchers is doubling roughly every month
OpenAI researchers’ coding-agent usage, valued at API prices, has recently been doubling roughly every month, according to breakpoint fits.
How many AI agents could run on the AI chips shipped through 2027?
Memory shipped through 2027 could run 33–171 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or billions using efficient open models. Epoch AI estimates inference capacity from HBM supply, serving benchmarks, and agent-hour costs.
Introducing the ChatGPT usage explorer
Median monthly messages per active user rose from 14 in 2023 to 36 in 2025, and the top 10% of users sent 63% of all prompts. Epoch AI's ChatGPT usage explorer draws on 8.3 million messages from 5,000 US YouGov panelists.
AI has improved significantly at reasoning about IKEA furniture assembly
AI model scores on Epoch AI's IKEA furniture assembly benchmark jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months, with open-weight models trailing closed-weight models by about 7 months. Epoch AI's test of visual and spatial reasoning across 60 photos from three furniture builds.
The plunging price of thought
Epoch AI measures how fast the cost of a given level of AI performance is falling across five benchmarks covering math, science and games of skill: about 47% per quarter, or 13x per year, since 2023, faster than electricity, compute, batteries or DNA sequencing ever fell.
In August, 25% of math preprints acknowledged AI use, up from 4% in April
Acknowledgments of AI use in arXiv math preprints rose from 4% in April 2026 to 25% in August, with 6% crediting AI with a substantial research contribution.
Trade data is consistent with more than $3 billion of chips smuggled into China via Malaysia
Epoch AI's analysis of trade data finds a pattern consistent with $3B worth of chips smuggled to China via Malaysia. China recorded $3.8B of server imports from Malaysia in 2024–25; Malaysia recorded only $0.6B of exports.
GPT-6 Astra leads on math benchmarks, but not on software engineering
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) with a score of 166, ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 at 164 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 162. Its Math-ECI of 170 sets a new record, but on software engineering benchmarks its SWE-ECI of 164 still lags behind Fable 5.1's 167.
We're scaling our AI Data Centers research
Epoch AI's AI Data Centers explorer now covers an estimated 44% of global AI compute across 86 sites, with a redesigned interface and expanding global coverage.
Near-daily AI use among US adults has more than doubled in six months
The share of US adults using AI at least 6 days a week rose from 8% in March 2026 to 19% in August 2026, according to Epoch AI/Ipsos polling.
Introducing the AI Chip Users explorer
A first look at Epoch AI's data on compute usage across five leading labs.
Long-context latency scales quadratically for GPT-5.6 but nearly linearly for Claude 5
Epoch AI measures long-context latency scaling across four frontier models. GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol show quadratic time-to-first-token growth with context length, while Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 stay near-linear.
Will Huawei catch up to Nvidia by 2030?
Huawei plans major gains in AI chip performance by 2030, but US export controls cap its most important scaling levers. Epoch AI estimates Huawei will produce less than 4% as much AI compute as Nvidia in 2026, a share that could be around 1% by 2028 without access to foreign me…
The record for power capacity in a single data center has doubled every 10 months
Since mid-2024, the record for the largest AI data center by IT power capacity has doubled every ten months. Epoch AI's analysis of frontier data center power trends through 2028.
The ECI frontier has advanced by 14 points per year since the introduction of reasoning models
Announcing FrontierMath Erdős
A benchmark of 68 significant Erdős problems, open as of August 2026, curated by Thomas Bloom and formalized in Lean. AI systems must prove or disprove them within a fixed budget.
An update on AI’s most important number
How quickly are Anthropic and OpenAI growing their revenue?