Agentic BAIM-LLM Evaluation (ABLE): Benchmarking LLM Use of Protein Design Tools

Abstract:We introduce ABLE, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents' ability to use biological AI models (BAIMs), such as ProteinMPNN and AlphaFold3, in dual-use protein design workflows. ABLE assesses agent performance through a set of tasks spanning structure retrieval, sequence generation, and design validation. We evaluate 15 frontier models and find that seven refuse all tasks, while the remaining models exhibit substantial performance differences. Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Pro achieve the highest scores across information retrieval, tool selection, and tool use. We further compare model performance on a subset of tasks against an expert human baseline. Our results suggest that current LLMs can substantially lower barriers to protein design, but remain inconsistent in planning, strategy generation, and integrating biological knowledge with tool use.

Last revised in February 2026; presented without further revision. An earlier revision at was presented at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Biosecurity Safeguards for Generative AI; see this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)

arXiv:2609.05818 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.05818v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05818 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)