ProtocolQA

ProtocolQA is a multiple-choice benchmark on troubleshooting failed experimental outcomes from common biological laboratory protocols. It evaluates dual-use biological knowledge relevant to bioweapons development.

Grok-4.1 Thinking from xAI currently leads the ProtocolQA leaderboard with a score of 0.790 across 1 evaluated AI models.

Paper
About this benchmark

What ProtocolQA measures

ProtocolQA is a text benchmark that evaluates large language models on safety and healthcare tasks. LLM Stats tracks 1 model on this benchmark, with a maximum possible score of 1. Current average across reported models is 0.8, with the leader reaching 0.8.

Compare leaders on the best AI for safety and best AI for healthcare leaderboards.

Publication

Paper
LAB-Bench: Measuring Capabilities of Language Models for Biology Research
Authors
Jon M. Laurent, Joseph D. Janizek, Michael Ruzo, Michaela M. Hinks, and 5 others
Published

Abstract

There is widespread optimism that frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-augmented systems have the potential to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery across disciplines. Today, many benchmarks exist to measure LLM knowledge and reasoning on textbook-style science questions, but few if any benchmarks are designed to evaluate language model performance on practical tasks required for scientific research, such as literature search, protocol planning, and data analysis. As a step toward building such benchmarks, we introduce the Language Agent Biology Benchmark (LAB-Bench), a broad dataset of over 2,400 multiple choice questions for evaluating AI systems on a range of practical biology research capabilities, including recall and reasoning over literature, interpretation of figures, access and navigation of databases, and comprehension and manipulation of DNA and protein sequences. Importantly, in contrast to previous scientific benchmarks, we expect that an AI system that can achieve consistently high scores on the more difficult LAB-Bench tasks would serve as a useful assistant for researchers in areas such as literature search and molecular cloning. As an initial assessment of the emergent scientific task capabilities of frontier language models, we measure performance of several against our benchmark and report results compared to human expert biology researchers. We will continue to update and expand LAB-Bench over time, and expect it to serve as a useful tool in the development of automated research systems going forward. A public subset of LAB-Bench is available for use at the following URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/futurehouse/lab-bench

xAIGrok-4.1 Thinking leads with 79.0%.

Progress Over Time

Interactive timeline showing model performance evolution on ProtocolQA

State-of-the-art frontier
Open
Proprietary

ProtocolQA Leaderboard

1 models
ContextCostLicense
1
Notice missing or incorrect data?

FAQ

Common questions about ProtocolQA.

What is the ProtocolQA benchmark?

ProtocolQA is a multiple-choice benchmark on troubleshooting failed experimental outcomes from common biological laboratory protocols. It evaluates dual-use biological knowledge relevant to bioweapons development.

What is the ProtocolQA leaderboard?

The ProtocolQA leaderboard ranks 1 AI models based on their performance on this benchmark. Currently, Grok-4.1 Thinking by xAI leads with a score of 0.790. The average score across all models is 0.790.

What is the highest ProtocolQA score?

The highest ProtocolQA score is 0.790, achieved by Grok-4.1 Thinking from xAI.

How many models are evaluated on ProtocolQA?

1 models have been evaluated on the ProtocolQA benchmark, with 0 verified results and 1 self-reported results.

Where can I find the ProtocolQA paper?

The ProtocolQA paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10362. The paper details the methodology, dataset construction, and evaluation criteria.

What categories does ProtocolQA cover?

ProtocolQA is categorized under safety and healthcare. The benchmark evaluates text models.

How recent are the ProtocolQA leaderboard results?

The ProtocolQA leaderboard was last updated in June 2026 and currently includes 1 evaluated models.

More evaluations to explore

Related benchmarks in the same category

View all safety
MMLU-Pro

A more robust and challenging multi-task language understanding benchmark that extends MMLU by expanding multiple-choice options from 4 to 10, eliminating trivial questions, and focusing on reasoning-intensive tasks. Features over 12,000 curated questions across 14 domains and causes a 16-33% accuracy drop compared to original MMLU.

healthcare
127 models
MMLU

Massive Multitask Language Understanding benchmark testing knowledge across 57 diverse subjects including STEM, humanities, social sciences, and professional domains

healthcare
100 models
MMMU

MMMU (Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding) is a benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal models on college-level subject knowledge and deliberate reasoning. Contains 11.5K meticulously collected multimodal questions from college exams, quizzes, and textbooks, covering six core disciplines: Art & Design, Business, Science, Health & Medicine, Humanities & Social Science, and Tech & Engineering across 30 subjects and 183 subfields.

healthcaremultimodal
62 models
SuperGPQA

SuperGPQA is a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates large language models across 285 graduate-level academic disciplines. The benchmark contains 25,957 questions covering 13 broad disciplinary areas including Engineering, Medicine, Science, and Law, with specialized fields in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented domains. It employs a Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism with over 80 expert annotators to create challenging questions that assess graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities.

healthcare
31 models
MMLU-ProX

Extended version of MMLU-Pro providing additional challenging multiple-choice questions for evaluating language models across diverse academic and professional domains. Built on the foundation of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding benchmark framework.

healthcare
30 models
VideoMMMU

Video-MMMU evaluates Large Multimodal Models' ability to acquire knowledge from expert-level professional videos across six disciplines through three cognitive stages: perception, comprehension, and adaptation. Contains 300 videos and 900 human-annotated questions spanning Art, Business, Science, Medicine, Humanities, and Engineering.

healthcaremultimodal
25 models