OpenAI wants to retire the AI coding benchmark that everyone has been competing on

OpenAI says the SWE-bench Verified programming benchmark has lost its value as a meaningful measure of AI coding ability. The company points to two main problems: at least 59.4 percent of the benchmark's tasks are flawed, rejecting correct solutions because they enforce specific implementation details or check functions not described in the task.

Many tasks and solutions have also leaked into leading models' training data. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Flash Preview could reproduce some original fixes from memory, meaning benchmark progress increasingly reflects what a model has seen, not how well it codes. OpenAI recommends SWE-bench Pro instead and is building its own non-public tests.

There's a possible strategic angle here: a "contaminated" benchmark can make rivals—especially open-source models—look better and skew rankings. SWE-bench Verified was long the gold standard for AI coding evaluation, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and many Chinese open-weight models competing for small leads. AI benchmarks can provide useful signal, but their real-world value remains limited.