We ran a one-day protein design competition with muni: 10 human teams against 6 autonomous frontier LLM agents (GPT-5.2, Claude, Grok 4.1, Gemini, Qwen, GLM 5), all targeting TREM2, a receptor implicated in Alzheimer's.
141 designs came in, the top 100 by Boltz-2 ipSAE went into the Adaptyv wet lab, and 37 came back as binders.
The two cohorts landed within a coin flip of each other: humans hit 25 of 65 designs (38.5%) and agents hit 12 of 35 (34.3%), with overlapping affinity distributions. The best human binder, 17_MRAZS_mosaic, reached 1.11 nM (team MRAZS swept three of the top four spots), and the best agent binder, 132_GPT_5_2_PXDesign, came in at 3.64 nM with GPT-5.2 winning the agent bracket.
The strangest finding was tool convergence: all six agents independently picked PXDesign (ByteDance), accounting for all 10 of the top agent binders, while none of them reached for Mosaic, BindCraft, or RFdiffusion. Mosaic is what MRAZS used to win this round, and what Escalante used to sweep our Nipah competition two months earlier. Frontier-model RAG converges on whatever is recent and well-indexed; humans converge on whatever they've personally seen win.
All designs and binding data are open under ODC-BY.
id: quiet-gecko-granite

TREM2
Strong
1.1e-9 M
True
9.4 kDa
88
id: jade-mole-lotus

TREM2
Strong
1.3e-9 M
True
9.5 kDa
93
id: strong-panda-snow

TREM2
Strong
1.9e-9 M
True
13.2 kDa
112
id: scarlet-mole-vine

TREM2
Strong
3.6e-9 M
True
10.4 kDa
100
id: pale-eagle-crystal

TREM2
Strong
6.8e-9 M
True
10.4 kDa
100
id: misty-orca-jade

TREM2
Strong
1.2e-8 M
True
11.4 kDa
100
id: golden-gecko-stone

TREM2
Strong
2.2e-8 M
True
26.2 kDa
245
id: rough-panda-ivy

TREM2
Strong
2.7e-8 M
True
10.2 kDa
100
id: wild-raven-ruby

TREM2
Strong
3.2e-8 M
True
8.9 kDa
85
id: solid-ox-moss

TREM2
Medium
3.5e-8 M
True
11.1 kDa
100
id: pale-heron-quartz

TREM2
Strong
3.5e-8 M
True
8.5 kDa
80
id: ivory-crane-bronze

TREM2
Medium
4.6e-8 M
True
10.3 kDa
85
id: young-ox-ivy

TREM2
Strong
4.6e-8 M
True
10.1 kDa
90
id: brisk-vole-pearl

TREM2
Medium
7.0e-8 M
True
10.1 kDa
100
id: hollow-boar-iron

TREM2
Medium
7.3e-8 M
True
9.0 kDa
91
id: vast-quail-pine

TREM2
Medium
8.1e-8 M
True
10.6 kDa
100
id: radiant-vole-willow

TREM2
Medium
8.2e-8 M
True
8.6 kDa
81
id: violet-goat-flint

TREM2
Medium
8.6e-8 M
True
10.5 kDa
88
id: green-tiger-cedar

TREM2
Medium
9.7e-8 M
True
10.5 kDa
88
id: crimson-yak-willow

TREM2
Medium
1.4e-7 M
True
9.8 kDa
90
id: silver-cobra-reed

TREM2
Medium
1.8e-7 M
True
10.8 kDa
100