Interpreting Dual-Use Biology Benchmarks for Frontier AI

Measurement, Saturation, and Generational Analysis

Grant Ellison, Jeffrey Lee, Barbara Del Castello, Sunishchal Dev, Kyle Brady

ResearchPublished Aug 6, 2026

The authors use item response theory and an interpretive taxonomy to address the motivating question: “What can benchmark data reveal about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do now that it could not do before?” Findings indicate that many benchmark tasks are no longer informative, but there is a discriminating frontier of tasks, with recent gains in performance concentrated in difficult tasks theorized to be relevant to real-world risks.

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Ellison, Grant, Jeffrey Lee, Barbara Del Castello, Sunishchal Dev, and Kyle Brady, Interpreting Dual-Use Biology Benchmarks for Frontier AI: Measurement, Saturation, and Generational Analysis. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA5055-1.html.
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