Robocurve tests AI models with real robot arms, finds safety issues

Two hardware studies suggest frontier models rarely refuse hazardous robot tasks, and doctored camera footage made them even more compliant Chatbots have gotten pretty good at saying no. Put the same models in charge of a physical robot arm, and that reluctance seems to evaporate. That is the core finding from Robocurve, an independent AI and robotics evaluation firm. Across two studies run on real hardware, it found that frontier AI models rarely refused hazardous tasks. In its follow-up study, five frontier models attempted unsafe tasks more often when the robot’s camera feed was blurred or doctored. Round one: the RoboHarm benchmark Robocurve released its first study, the RoboHarm benchmark, on September 18, 2026. It assessed three robot-control policies on real I2RT YAM bimanual robot arms. Bimanual simply means two arms working together, roughly the way you would use both hands to open a jar. The three systems tested were Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, and Ai2’s MolmoAct2. Each ran through 100 trials involving hazardous tasks, for 300 trials in total. Refusals on safety grounds were scarce. Claude Fable 5.1 declined in 20 of its 100 trials, and most of tho...