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AI Agent Glossary

Jagged frontier

The uneven capability profile of AI: superhuman on some tasks, failing on adjacent easy ones.

The jagged frontier describes how model capability does not follow human intuitions of difficulty: a system that resolves complex GitHub issues may read an analog clock correctly only 50.1% of the time (Stanford AI Index 2026). For agent design it means task decomposition must be tested empirically, not assumed from human difficulty rankings.

Source: Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier — Dell'Acqua et al., Harvard Business School, 2023

See the numbers behind this term: AI Agent Statistics 2026.