Clean Scores, Buried Evidence, and Confident Wrong: A Receipt-Based Audit of Frontier Agentic QA

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Frontier models score well on shallow document/chart reading tasks. In a controlled data-room audit, moving evidence into buried conditions reduced accuracy, increased forced declarations, increased tool calls, and increased cost per correct answer. Confidence and benchmark calibration did not fully capture wrong answers; a documented production incident shows fabricated structural claims can be mixed with accurate numeric tables. Agentic evaluations need claim-level receipts (statement-level provenance, not answer-level scores), condition-aware scoring, and human-adversarial verification - an auditing discipline, not a leaderboard. The setting we measure is financial due diligence; the setting we are building toward next is defense staff work, where the same buried-evidence shape appears. In both, the model is not a party to the consequences; the person who signs is. In plain terms: in the documented cases we examine, agents can pair accurate numbers with confident fabricated explanations, and the burden of proof must therefore move from the model to the evidence trail.