Agents Can Build Experiments but Fail to Advance AI Research: Early Study
Researchers let frontier AI agents tackle the open‑ended problem of two unpublished NeurIPS 2026 papers. The agents handled all engineering steps without human help but couldn’t make substantive progress, revealing five failure modes—poor judgment, lack of creativity, dead‑end backtracking, resource blindness, and instruction drift. The results suggest today’s agents still fall short of autonomous AI R&D.