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Surge AI says tax-work benchmark trips frontier agents
Surge AI said its DAYJOB: Tax test of 50 professional assignments left Claude models with pass rates around 9% to 11%, according to a company blog post.
Surge AI on Tuesday described DAYJOB: Tax, a 50-assignment benchmark of professional tax work, and said leading models it tested passed only a small share of tasks under a strict rubric1.
The company said Claude Sonnet 5.5 led its leaderboard with a 10.8% pass rate, followed by Claude Fable 5.1 at 9.6% and Claude Opus 5.5 at 9.2%1.
Surge said it reports pass@1 at a 95% rubric threshold, meaning an attempt passes only if it meets at least 95% of a task's criteria covering calculations, supporting evidence, consequential issues and the finished deliverable1.
The benchmark, according to the company, covers eight practice areas: individual and family tax; small-business tax; partnerships; property and investments; estates, gifts and trusts; international tax; corporate transactions; and tax review and disputes1.
Agents receive client requests and supporting records and are asked to produce returns, workpapers, technical reviews or advice1.
Surge said the workspaces contain 1,789 files, with a median of 30 per assignment and as many as 123, including 1,487 PDFs, 117 Excel workbooks and 38 Word documents, plus emails, images and other records1.
The company said tax experts built the tasks from professional workflows and that each task goes through a three-layer expert review1.
In one example, Surge said an agent correctly compared two condo-sale dates for a residence exclusion but, across five attempts, Astra never flagged that eligibility could lapse around August 2027 after the client moved out in August 2024, while Opus identified the deadline in all five attempts1.
In another, the company said Opus 5.5 treated a couple as unmarried in all five attempts despite records of time in Texas and a ceremony in Colorado that could affect how retirement accounts can be divided; it said Astra raised the need to verify marital status in four of five attempts1.
Surge contrasted DAYJOB with TaxBench, TaxCalcBench and TaxLab, saying those tests start from a defined question or return while DAYJOB asks whether agents can find issues the client did not raise1.
The results have not been independently audited in the post. Surge invited readers to request access to the full benchmark at [email protected]1.
