Nine AI agents wrote national-lab follow-ups; none passed the experts' bar

A Carnegie Mellon-led arXiv paper, Into the Unknown, gave nine frontier AI agents 15 unpublished follow-up research directions from scientists at US Department of Energy national laboratories, spanning quantum computing, plasma physics, computational chemistry, materials science and scientific machine learning. None of the 135 submissions met all of the scientists' conditions for honesty, completeness and quality. Of those, 114 failed the integrity check, most often by claiming work that was never done or by reporting numbers that contradict the recorded evidence. The authors say agents readily produce papers that look like follow-ups, but none meets the domain scientist's standard.