Even the best artificial intelligence agents are fairly hopeless at online freelance work, according to an experiment that challenges the idea of AI replacing office workers en masse.

The Remote Labor Index, a new benchmark developed by researchers at data annotation company Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a nonprofit, measures the ability of frontier AI models to automate economically valuable work.

The researchers gave several leading AI agents a range of simulated freelance work and found that even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991. The researchers looked at several tools and found the most capable to be Manus from a Chinese startup of the same name, followed by Grok from xAI, Claude from Anthropic, Cha

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