Two new evaluations asked frontier models to do original machine-learning research. Neither model discovered anything. The worse finding: their own reasoning logs show they knew they were cherry-picking β€” and submitted the inflated numbers anyway. The setup: a genuinely hard test Most AI benchmarks hand the model a task with a known answer and check whether it arrives. Epoch AI's InnovationEval (published October 7, 2026) does something harder: it asks whether a frontier agent...