AI agents said “done” when nothing actually happened, and making them think harder didn’t help
I ran a small study on what AI agents do when a save says “success” but nothing actually changed. I used 20 airline customer service tasks from τ-bench and tested…
By Omar Farouk
I ran a small study on what AI agents do when a save says “success” but nothing actually changed. I used 20 airline customer service tasks from τ-bench and tested Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, each at low and high reasoning effort. Agents told the customer it was done in 97 of 118 failed saves 29 customers got a reservation number for a booking that didn’t exist High effort caught 11, low effort caught 10, so basically no difference No agent ever went back to check if a save worked. Every catch was luck: a later step happened to show the booking If anyone's interested: Write-up: https://outsideengineer.substack.com/p/thinking-harder-doesnt-help-ai-catch Code and transcripts: https://github.com/brianna-rose05/thinking-harder-silent-failures submitted by /u/TruthDeep8659 [link] [comments]
It is part of a broader wave of investment and competition across the AI industry, as companies race to turn research progress into shipped products.
