Artificial Analysis@ArtificialAnlys
Announcing AA-Briefcase, the benchmark for the next era of agentic knowledge work
AA-Briefcase is our new benchmark for testing models on long-horizon knowledge work tasks in complex projects built by industry experts. Models are evaluated on multi-week projects, each with many linked tasks and thousands of input source files.
We evaluated Claude Fable 5 from @AnthropicAI before it became unavailable, and it currently leads with an Elo score of 1587, followed by Claude Opus 4.8 (max, 1356), Opus 4.7, and the recently-released GLM 5.2 (max, 1266) from @Zai_org.
Claude Fable 5 cost $31 on average to run each AA-Briefcase task, followed by Claude Opus 4.8 at $10.40, GPT-5.5 (xhigh) at $3.68 and GLM-5.2 (max) at $2.40.
AA-Briefcase comprises four private scenarios, each representing a multi-week knowledge work project set in a realistic organizational context. A public fifth scenario has been released via @huggingface as a representation of scenario structure, submission, and grading (AA-Briefcase Lite). This does not count toward official AA-Briefcase results, and is demonstrative only.
Key elements of AA-Briefcase:
➤ Realistic long-horizon projects: AA-Briefcase moves beyond single, disconnected prompts by evaluating models across a coherent long-horizon project. Tasks build week by week, draw on shared institutional context, and require deliverables such as financial models, board presentations, and design mock-ups
➤ Large volumes of fragmented context: AA-Briefcase requires models to reason across thousands of inputs, including company documents, meeting transcripts, large-scale data exports, 25,000+ Slack messages and 3,500+ emails. These sources are fragmented, messy, and often contain realistic contradiction, testing whether models can navigate the ambiguity of real-world knowledge work
➤ Composite rubric and pairwise grading: AA-Briefcase combines binary rubric checks for ground-truth correctness with pairwise grading on analytical quality and presentation quality. Unlike many evaluations that focus on a single metric, AA-Briefcase tests agentic capabilities more comprehensively, exposing cases where models produce outputs that look polished but are incorrect or lack analytical rigor
➤ Built by industry experts: AA-Briefcase scenarios mirror real-world knowledge work, with tasks developed over months by experts across data science, product management and corporate strategy from companies including Google, McKinsey & Company and BCG. Task challenges are drawn from professional experience, making AA-Briefcase more reflective of the ambiguity, messy context and competing priorities that define real-world knowledge work
Key results:
➤ Claude Fable 5 leads AA-Briefcase at 1587 Elo: This is followed by Claude Opus 4.8 (1356) with the next-best non-Anthropic model, GLM-5.2 (max), ~90 points back at 1266. Note that Claude Fable 5 did not use the Opus 4.8 fallback for any task in AA-Briefcase
➤ Cost per task varies by ~800x across models tested: Claude Fable 5 leads the benchmark but costs more than $31 per task on average, compared to ~$0.04 for DeepSeek V4 Flash (max). The strongest price/performance options are open weights models such as GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro (max), with GLM-5.2 (max) scoring only ~90 Elo below Claude Opus 4.8 (max) for less than 25% of the cost
➤ Real-world complexity remains difficult for models: The top performer, Claude Fable 5, satisfies all rubric criteria on just 3% of AA-Briefcase tasks. On 31 of 91 tasks, no model scores above 50% on the rubric criteria
➤ Task difficulty scales with the number of required input files: For each rubric check, we identify the set of source files needed to pass. Across all models, pass rates fall as this file count increases, though top-tier models degrade less than weaker models
More details below in thread ⬇️
