Researchers at Princeton University have introduced CEO-Bench, a benchmark that asks AI agents to run a fictional software company for 500 simulated days. In the test, most current models went broke, and a simple rule-based heuristic outperformed nearly all of them.
The result highlights a gap between short-horizon reasoning benchmarks and sustained business decision-making. Running a company simulation requires planning, resource allocation and recovery from earlier choices, not just isolated answers.
For agent developers, CEO-Bench adds pressure to measure long-running outcomes rather than polished intermediate responses.