Sayash Kapoor, author of the newsletter Normal Tech, announced STABL, a nonprofit that evaluates whether agents can do open-ended research, and says papers written by frontier agents were clearly rejected by expert reviewers.

Concept illustration on a mustard background: at lower left a person seen from behind points a raised finger at a laptop on a small table, beside a sign lettered STABL, and a large black opening quotation mark sits at top centre. From the laptop, whose screen shows a speech bubble, two white paths branch to the right: on the upper one three sheets of paper lead toward a post with a sign lettered CHECKER and an upward-angled red-and-white barrier arm, beyond which a stack of papers sits at the path's end; on the lower one a red spiral-bound book with motion lines trailing behind it moves right toward a desk under a sign lettered REVIEWERS, where the leftmost of three seated people holds an open palm against the book. Printed on the image: Kapoor and coauthors judge a widening performance gap: automatically verifiable vs open-ended tasks.

"The performance gap between automatically verifiable tasks and open-ended tasks is widening" is the judgment of Kapoor and coauthors, based on CRUX, an evaluation the authors run themselves, and the post doesn't give the sample or the models tested. Normal Tech was formerly called AI Snake Oil. CRUX tests whether agents can do open-ended AI research. Kapoor also argues that the pace of social change is limited more by how fast people and organizations change than by model capability. The post is both a founding statement and a fundraising appeal, and it doesn't list funders (Normal Tech, 2026-11-10). How we checked →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Nov 11, 2026, alongside 15 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Sayash Kapoor, author of the newsletter Normal Tech, announced STABL, a nonprofit that evaluates whether agents can do open-ended research, and says papers written by frontier agents were clearly rejected by expert reviewers.." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-11-11-1/. Accessed access date.