The researchers gave several leading AI agents a range of simulated freelance work and found that even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991. The researchers looked at several tools and found the most capable to be Manus from a Chinese startup of the same name, followed by Grok from xAI, Claude from Anthropic, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Gemini from Google.