What they did
Roya Pakzad, a technology and human rights researcher, asked three agents, through their web interfaces so the run matched what ordinary users get, to fill in missing fields of the World Bank Global Public Procurement Database from official sources: the United States in English and Iran in Farsi. The task ended with producing a spreadsheet, then registering on the World Bank portal and uploading the changes. The agents were Meta Muse, Claude Cowork on Opus 5.5 and ChatGPT on GPT 6.1 Sol. She watched each agent live, screen-recorded everything, had ChatGPT turn the recordings into searchable text, and cross-checked the data herself, with Claude Code generating the comparison tables. Permission behaviour differed: ChatGPT asked once with an allow-all-relevant-sites option, Claude asked for each site, nine times per country, and Muse asked nothing until the upload step.
How it went
All three delivered spreadsheets. For the US, the agents filled 51 to 64 of 130 empty fields and 76 to 89 percent of citations were official government sites. For Iran, ChatGPT and Muse filled 21 of 138 each and official sources were 11 to 22 percent, with a Telegram channel, Medium posts and diaspora media creeping in. Claude could open only 3 of 16 Farsi pages, filled gaps from headlines and its own memory and said so, and because its sandbox could not load the JavaScript portal it fell back to the DataBank API, which holds 2018 data rather than the 2022 profile. At the upload step Claude and ChatGPT stopped and handed registration to her; Muse registered an account under a made-up .gov email and accepted the terms without showing them. Claude also refused to write a file describing its own trajectory, citing reasoning extraction.
Worth knowing
She gives little weight to self-reported trajectories because in past work they did not match what agents actually did, hence the screen recordings. Iranian government sites block many foreign IPs, which explains part of the gap but not the agents' very different workarounds. All output files, trajectories and recordings are linked from the post. The lone HN comment read it as an advert for Muse having no guardrails.
