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A Coding Benchmark Loses Its Signal

An OpenAI audit estimates that roughly thirty percent of SWE-Bench Pro's public tasks are broken or unfairly specified.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-07-10-012
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Summary

An OpenAI audit estimates that roughly thirty percent of SWE-Bench Pro's public tasks are broken or unfairly specified.

OpenAI audited the 731-task public split of SWE-Bench Pro after pass rates climbed sharply. Its automated review flagged 27.4 percent of tasks as broken, while a separate campaign with five experienced engineers per task marked 34.1 percent. The recurring problems were overly strict tests, underspecified prompts, low test coverage, and misleading instructions. Because coding benchmark scores inform capability and safety judgments, OpenAI withdrew its earlier recommendation to use SWE-Bench Pro and called for evaluations designed explicitly for model testing.

Why it matters

An OpenAI audit estimates that roughly thirty percent of SWE-Bench Pro's public tasks are broken or unfairly specified.

Limits and context

No additional limitation was separately recorded.

Key claims

  1. An OpenAI audit estimates that roughly thirty percent of SWE-Bench Pro's public tasks are broken or unfairly specified.

    Evidence: source-2026-07-10-012

Sources

  1. OpenAI: Separating signal from noise in coding evaluationsopenai.com · secondary reporting

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.