# What does a Terminal-Bench score mean?

A Terminal-Bench score averages seven very different task categories, software, science, ML, operations, hardware, security, and media, and that average can hide near-total failure in some of them. On the 4.0 leaderboard, the top model, Claude Opus 5.5, leads at 61.62% overall, but that number comes from strength that isn't evenly spread: it posts 78.79% on ML and only 48.15% on operations, its weakest category among the ones it still leads. Hardware and media are the harder story for the field as a whole: seventeen of the thirty-one models scored zero on each, while operations and hardware post the lowest average scores across every model tested, 11.7% and 12.5%.

A high overall score, in other words, says a model handles the categories it's strong in, not that it can do all seven kinds of work. [The same gap shows up in Gaia2's own scores](/answers/gaia/what-does-a-gaia2-score-mean), where one split lands near 80% and a harder one lands at zero on the identical run. Check which categories actually drove a Terminal-Bench number before reading it as one verdict on an agent's terminal skills.

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Sources:
- Terminal-Bench 4.0 leaderboard (Vals AI): https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/terminal-bench-4 (fetched 2026-09-23)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/terminal-bench/what-does-a-terminal-bench-score-mean
More on Terminal bench: https://tessary.ai/answers/terminal-bench
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai