frontierlag

Audit the capability gap between frontier AI and the models tested in academic papers.

Paste a DOI. Get a report: what model the paper tested, where it sat relative to the frontier at evaluation date, what configuration the paper disclosed, and whether the paper fails all three audit dimensions at the pre-registered thresholds from the companion study.

$ pip install frontierlag
$ frontierlag check 10.1038/s41591-024-03425-5

This package is the software companion to Frontier Lag: A Bibliometric Audit of Capability Misrepresentation in Academic AI Evaluation (Gringras and Salahshoor, 2026). The audit dataset embedded here is the frozen snapshot used in that paper; updates ship as point releases.

What it does

frontierlag classifies published AI-capability evaluations against the pre-registered audit dimensions from Gringras (2026). Three primary dimensions (the H5 compound-failure outcome), one secondary magnitude (capability-elicitation shortfall), and one tertiary transparency vector (temporal, tier, elicitation):

A paper flagged on all three at the pre-registered thresholds is a compound failure (pre-reg §2.2 H5).

The package also returns:

• capability_elicitation_shortfall — the secondary magnitude eci_gap × (1 - config_elicitation_index), capturing the interaction between capability distance and configuration under-disclosure.
• Three-component vector (temporal_gap_months, tier_gap_count, elicitation_gap_fraction) — readers do their own weighting.

The package does not estimate counterfactual capability; it does not claim "the paper's conclusion would have been X if they had used Y." Descriptive, not normative: the audit documents structural lag, it does not rank authors or score papers as "bad research."

Quick start

import frontierlag as fl

# By DOI (hits the frozen corpus if the paper is in the audit; otherwise
# resolves publication date via CrossRef and leaves you to supply the model).
report = fl.check("10.1038/s41591-024-03425-5")
print(report.to_text())

# Override / supply fields for a paper not in the frozen corpus.
report = fl.check(
    "10.1000/your-doi",
    primary_model="GPT-4",
    evaluation_date="2024-06-01",
    configuration_disclosures={
        "model_version_exact": True,
        "access_date": True,
        "reasoning_mode": None,
        "tool_use": False,
    },
)

# Audit already-extracted metadata.
from frontierlag import audit, PaperMetadata
m = PaperMetadata(
    primary_model="GPT-3.5",
    publication_date="2025-07-01",
    evaluation_date="2025-05-01",
    configuration_disclosures={"reasoning_mode": False, "tool_use": False},
    human_comparator_present=False,
    conclusion_framing="ai_generic",
    task_admissibility="expected",
    domain="medicine",
)
report = audit(m)  # default: AND-of-two pre-registered primary
print(report.compound_failure)                 # pre-registered binary
print(report.capability_elicitation_shortfall) # secondary magnitude
print((report.temporal_gap_months, report.tier_gap_count, report.elicitation_gap_fraction))

# Provenance for false-positive diagnosis.
diag = audit(m, return_provenance=True).provenance
print(diag["classifications"]["compound_failure_prereg"])
print(diag["inputs"])

# Individual lookups.
fl.lookup_model("claude-3.5-sonnet")
fl.get_frontier_at_date("2025-06-01")
fl.list_known_models()

CLI

frontierlag check <DOI>               audit a paper
frontierlag lookup <MODEL>            single-model metadata
frontierlag frontier <YYYY-MM-DD>     frontier at a date
frontierlag models                    list known canonical names
frontierlag info                      version + data-freeze date

Every command accepts --json for machine-readable output. frontierlag check accepts --model, --eval-date, and --config-file to override or supply fields a paper does not otherwise provide.

Data freeze

The embedded dataset is frozen at FREEZE_DATE = 2026-04-01. Every report prints this at the top so readers know how stale the comparison is. Updates ship as point releases.

Install

pip install frontierlag

Requires Python ≥ 3.9. Runtime dependencies are requests and pyyaml; no heavy scientific stack.

Companion artefacts

• Empirical audit paper — Frontier Lag (Gringras and Salahshoor, 2026).
• Reporting checklist — VERSIO-AI v1.2.
• Pre-registration — Open Science Framework, 10.17605/OSF.IO/7XM3D.
• Live web tool — https://frontierlag.org.

Citation

@software{gringras2026frontierlag,
  author  = {Gringras, David and Salahshoor, Misha},
  title   = {frontierlag: A {Python} package for auditing the capability gap of published {AI} evaluations},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {1.0.0},
  url     = {https://frontierlag.org}
}

License

MIT. See LICENSE.