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Research paperAgents & Tool Use · Robotics & Embodied AI · Reinforcement Learning1 source · Oct 7, 2026

AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?

We present AgentTime, a benchmark for testing whether agents can work for a requested duration, predict their runtime, and estimate elapsed time afterward.

Key points

  • An essential control of AI agents is their ability to manage runtime.
  • This ability requires a sense of time-awareness, to predict and estimate wall-clock time and to control their own actions.
  • Prior work has focused on time-awareness, but duration-following and control in native agent harnesses remain unexplored.
  • Accuracy on these instructions varies substantially: Fable 5.1 in Claude Code deviates from requested runtimes by a typical factor of 2.9$\times$, compared with only 1.2$\times$ for GPT-6 Astra in Codex.

Sources (1)

  • [1]AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 7, 12:26 PM
    We present AgentTime, a benchmark for testing whether agents can work for a requested duration, predict their runtime, and estimate elapsed time afterward.
    An essential control of AI agents is their ability to manage runtime.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.