The Ability of Frontier Models to Control Robots is Rapidly Improving

Summary We demonstrate that general purpose multimodal language models (LMs) are increasingly capable of directly controlling real robotic arms (e.g., by specifying gripper positions) to manipulate their environment. Performance increases on our benchmark between July and October 2026 (inclusive) correspond to a performance doubling time of 53.9 days. The best recorded execution rate increased by a factor of 4.4 while the lowest recorded execution cost fell by a factor of 6.2. Right now, model performance is largely limited by their efficiency, not their ability to reason about the world. Models rarely get stuck. They may miss grasps, misjudge distances or fumble objects, but they usually make steady progress until they succeed. A fuller description of our methodology and results (submitted to TAG@CoRL) is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25287 . The introduction + figures in this post get you 90% of the content (of the post and the paper); I would skim them first. Related Work Adam Karvonen ( here ) and Lukas Petersson ( here ) evaluate robotic capabilities in 2025 and find that they are poor; the technology has improved. janvi ( here ) proposes a program for physical AI safety in