Beyond fabrication: Misattributed numbers in papers written by AI research agents

Abstract

Verifying numerical claims in research written by AI agents is an important but challenging problem. Recent benchmarks show that many agent-written papers fail integrity checks, but such verdicts, often produced by a single LLM judge, identify failure without explaining its nature, and existing checks either test a paper for internal consistency or test whether a reported value appears somewhere in an agent's output. We re-analyze all 540 released judgments from a recent public benchmark of AI research agents (nine agents, fifteen open research problems) and manually label 256 numerical claims from 18 submissions. Failures concentrate on alignment between the paper and the underlying work rather than overt cheating, and about four in five unsupported claims correspond to values in the agent's own files that come from the wrong experiment, metric, or run. We introduce a deterministic claim-to-evidence checker that scores whether the surrounding context identifies the claimed result and calibrates each claim against numerical decoys. With its rules fixed before labeling, it certifies claims with over 90% precision against blinded annotators (78 of 85; Cohen's kappa = 0.89), while verifying only a subset of claims; most claims it cannot verify are nevertheless traceable, so failure to verify is not evidence of falsehood. An LLM verifier given the same evidence recovers more traceable claims but accepts about three times as many misattributed ones, so the two are best used together. Applied to 99 submissions, the checker reveals large differences in traceability across agents, and a second judge from a different vendor preserves the official agent ranking while passing twice as many papers. These findings motivate provenance-first auditing of AI-produced research.