AI now catches far more errors in clinical trial papers than human peer reviewers: all 15 models tested scored 53% to 96% on planted errors, while untrained human reviewers averaged just 27%.

The result held on 58 new trials published in 2026, so the models weren’t simply recalling old papers they had seen in training; Claude Opus 5.5 scored highest at 99%.

Humans miss the errors that most change a trial’s meaning, catching text-table contradictions only 7% of the time, and they take 5 to 8.5 hours per review against AI’s 1.4 to 16.3 minutes.