SlowLab: Benchmarking Autonomous AI Agents on a Year of Experiments They Cannot Undo

Abstract

AI agents are increasingly proposed as autonomous experimenters, yet the benchmarks that test them mostly offer cheap experiments that answer at once. Experiments in physical facilities are different: they take months, occupy scarce equipment and cannot be undone. We present SlowLab, a benchmark in which an agent runs a one-year campaign in four simulated greenhouse compartments on a site whose crop, facility and prices are hidden. The agent decides when to plant which climate policy, whether to stop a crop and which measurements to read while crops grow, and at the end recommends one policy, which a private evaluator scores in weather the agent never saw. In a preregistered study on 48 unseen sites, three low-cost language-model agents ended near a standard grower setting and clearly below a Bayesian-optimisation baseline that starts from that setting. They ran the facility as two synchronous batches, so measurements taken during the season never changed what they planted, and these measurements improved no method's result. Letting other methods re-read the evidence a campaign had collected did not yield significantly better recommendations, which points to where the models start and which experiments they try. Code is released under the MIT license.