Inherent says Faraday AI agent surpassed larger models in paper replication
London AI lab Inherent, founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its Faraday agent has outperformed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 at independently reproducing the findings of published scientific papers. The startup says Faraday performed the task using Qwen 3.6, a 27-billion-parameter model, rather than a frontier-scale system.
The claim comes weeks after Inherent emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round. The company is pursuing a broader objective than result verification: it wants to build an AI scientist agent capable of helping discover new scientific knowledge across fields.
Paper replication as a test of scientific work
Reproducing a paper’s findings without being given the answer in advance is a useful exercise for assessing an agent’s ability to conduct research. Inherent cofounder and chief scientist Edward Hughes compared it with a common starting point for PhD students, who often learn by replicating existing work before pursuing original questions.
For Inherent, the reported benchmark result was less significant than the method used to reach it. The company set a bar beyond accuracy: Faraday was expected to show what it calls research taste, including judgment about which experiments are worth running and how to design them.
Reinforcement learning and external tools
Inherent says it relies on reinforcement learning to develop that judgment. This approach rewards an AI system for desirable outcomes rather than supplying a fixed set of rules. The company is betting that reward-based training will generalise more effectively to its longer-term goal of scientific agents operating across multiple disciplines.
Faraday was not designed to rebuild every capability internally. For coding work, Inherent had the agent use OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Codex, mirroring the way researchers use available software tools instead of developing each component themselves. The company frames Faraday as a teammate that investigates questions, runs experiments and returns with results for discussion, rather than an agent optimised merely to validate a user’s preference.
London hiring plans
Inherent has about a dozen employees working in person from King’s Cross, London, and plans to expand to roughly 20 to 25 people by the end of the year. Hughes has also argued against UK “garden leave” restrictions, which can prevent departing employees from joining or founding rival companies for months.
The practical implication for businesses evaluating research agents is to test their experimental choices, reproducibility and use of specialist tools alongside output accuracy. A smaller underlying model may still support a capable workflow when the agent’s training and tool orchestration fit the task.