AI Agents Now Automate 1 in 6 Freelance Jobs as Fable 5 Shatters CAIS Remote Labor Index Records

A new report from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) reveals AI agents can now complete 16.1% of real freelance projects at professional quality — a stunning leap from just 2.5% less than a year ago. The frontier has more than quadrupled in under eight months, a concrete signal of how quickly economically capable AI agents are advancing. The Remote Labor Index (RLI) measures how often AI agents can complete real, economically valuable freelance projects — including 3D & CAD, architecture, graphic design, video and animation, audio, data analysis, and web apps — at a quality a paying client would actually accept. Every deliverable is judged by human evaluators against a gold-standard deliverable produced by a paid professional, with the headline metric being the share of projects where the AI's work is judged as good as or better than the human's. Fable 5 reaches the highest automation rate measured so far at 16.1%, roughly double Opus 4.8 at 8.3%, while GPT-5.5 reaches 6.3%.