Agent Arena: user satisfaction, not task success, splits top AI labs' agents
Agent Arena compared the flagship agents of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Moonshot, xAI and DeepSeek across four of its signals between late June and the start of October. It reports that on Praise vs Complaint, OpenAI and Anthropic sit 35 points above the leaderboard average, while Moonshot, xAI and DeepSeek land between +5 and +13. Agent Arena also says the average lab's best model moved from -4 to +14 points on Confirmed Success in three months, with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 (Max) leading at +20, and that the spread between the six labs more than halved on Bash Recovery (34 to 16 points) and nearly halved on Steerability (19 to 11).
If the trend holds, agent competition may shift from whether tasks get done to whether users want to keep working with the agent.