Meituan LongCat Study Tests Whether AI Agents Can Do Research

Meituan LongCat evaluated 7 frontier models on 36 AI R&D tasks covering 756 trajectories, looking beyond final scores. Of 252 solutions, only 3 were novel approaches, and most adapted or combined established techniques. The authors conclude that current agents work more like engineering optimizers than autonomous researchers, with reliability, experience reuse, and novelty still open challenges.