OpenAI and Ligo introduce BioBasicsBench for everyday wet-lab biology

OpenAI and biological research laboratory Ligo introduced BioBasicsBench on 6 November 2026, a 100-task benchmark built from real wet-lab experiments to evaluate how AI agents handle routine experimental analysis. Rather than testing literature recall, each task supplies raw laboratory artifacts including agarose and polyacrylamide gels, multi-well assay plates, microscopy time-lapses, flow cytometry plots, and instrument readouts.

Agents must inspect the visual and tabular evidence, identify experimental controls or pipetting errors, and recognise when flawed or incomplete data cannot support a scientific conclusion. Graded on rubric-based mean reward at xhigh reasoning effort, GPT-6 Astra scored 66.7% across the 100 tasks, up from 43.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol. OpenAI uses the benchmark both to track scientific research assistance and to inform biological safety evaluations.