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Anchor: Mitigating Artifact Drift in Agent Benchmark Generation

Researchers introduced Anchor, a task-generation pipeline that prevents artifact drift in AI agent benchmarks by formalizing business workflow specifications into constraint optimization programs. The system jointly produces instructions, environments, certified solutions, and verifiers from a single parametric specification, enabling controlled difficulty and known optimal solutions. Applied to create ERP-Bench, a benchmark of 300 long-horizon enterprise tasks, the approach revealed that frontier models satisfy explicit constraints in only 26.1% of trials and achieve fully optimal solutions in just 17.4% of trials.

read1 min publishedMay 27, 2026

arXiv:2605.26321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are beginning to complete valuable, long-horizon business operations tasks, but training and evaluation environments for enterprise work still struggle to balance realism, verifiability, and scale. Environment and task creation frequently suffers from a failure mode we call artifact drift: when instructions, environments, oracles, and verifiers are created by loosely coupled processes, they frequently disagree on what a task requires, producing environments that are unsolvable, reward-hackable, or inconsistent. We introduce Anchor, a task-generation pipeline that formalizes domain experts' specifications of business workflows into constraint optimization programs. From a single parametric specification, the pipeline jointly produces a natural-language instruction, environment configuration, solver-certified ground-truth solution, and state-based verifier. With Anchor, altering parameters yields new tasks with controlled difficulty and known optimal solutions, producing harness-agnostic environments whose rewards depend solely on end-state business correctness. We apply Anchor to produce ERP-Bench: a benchmark of 300 long-horizon tasks spanning procurement and manufacturing workflows in a production-grade ERP system. We find that generation parameters predict realized difficulty, and that frontier models satisfy explicit task constraints in 26.1% of trials but reach a fully optimal solution in only 17.4% of trials. Overall, we show that Anchor and ERP-Bench offer a concrete recipe for building auditable evaluation environments for economically valuable agent work. We release the task generator and ERP-Bench dataset at erpbench.ai

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