The Growing Pains of Frontier Models: When Leaderboards Stop Separating and What to Measure Next

Leaderboards rank frontier models on independent axes but do not reveal whether capabilities reinforce or trade off across releases -- and at the frontier, this interaction is the more informative signal. We decompose paired SWE-bench and GPQA Diamond scores into a population coupling trend and per-release residual ($h$-field) that diagnoses capability emphasis from two public benchmark scores. Across 34 models from 10 labs (2024--2026), capabilities cooperate ($r = +0.72$, $p < 10^{-6}$), but c

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ethics.ai (13 May 2026), “The Growing Pains of Frontier Models: When Leaderboards Stop Separating and What to Measure Next,” evidence record 4422, https://ethics.ai/record/4422 (originally published by arXiv).

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