How Good Are Frontier Models at Physics? Expert Re-Grading Reveals Broken Evaluations and Near-Saturation of Leading Benchmarks

Understand

Low reported scores on leading physics benchmarks, including those featured in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026), suggest that frontier language models still struggle with advanced physics, a demanding test of their scientific reasoning and quantitative problem-solving abilities.

• Yet this impression does not always align with domain experts' experiences using these models in their work.
• We revisit these reported findings by evaluating frontier models on six widely used physics benchmarks and auditing them with experts, focusing on text-only problems with verifiable final answers.
• For each subfield of physics, faculty and graduate researchers with relevant expertise carefully review problem statements, reference solutions, and model responses to distinguish genuine model errors from grader errors, incorrect reference solutions, and ambiguous or underspecified questions.