OpenAI introduces LifeVal to test AI agents on everyday household and civic tasks

OpenAI introduced LifeVal on 2 November 2026 to measure how AI assistants handle practical household and personal administration rather than coding or academic exams. To construct the suite, OpenAI paired data from the American Time Use Survey and the Multinational Time Use Study with a demographically representative survey of 3,995 respondents asking where unpaid personal tasks consume the most time and effort.

The resulting multi-step scenarios span seven categories: caregiving, health, education, household administration, personal finances, shopping and government services. Completing a task requires an agent to combine web browsing, desktop computer use and external connectors while respecting constraints such as municipal deadlines, school catchment rules, dietary restrictions or county property portals.

In walkthrough examples drawn from what OpenAI calls its current models without naming a specific checkpoint, scores reached 100% on a Luzerne County home search and deed-record lookup, 98.0% on flood-volunteer coordination, 96.3% on setting up a remote sports watch for an elderly relative, 93.1% on shortlisting local kindergartens and 90.4% on assembling a diabetes care and meal plan. OpenAI uses LifeVal internally alongside GDPval and has not released the task dataset or a public leaderboard repository.