# The 97-to-Zero Problem: Why Frontier AI Fails When You Remove the Training Wheels

- slug: the-97-to-zero-problem-why-frontier-ai-fails-when-you-remove-the-training-wheels
- date: 2026-04-07
- category: Artificial Intelligence

Opus 4.6 hit 97% on an ARC-AGI-3 environment with a hand-crafted harness. Drop that same model into an unfamiliar task and it scores zero. That is not an intelligence gap. That is memorization dressed as reasoning.

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