VIALS-AA

Artificial Analysis built VIALS-AA on Handshake AI's VIALS benchmark to test visual reasoning over life-science artifacts such as gel blots, plasmid maps and phylogenies. Claude Fable 5.2 leads at 67%, ahead of Gemini 4 Carbon (64%) and GPT-6 Astra (63%). The more notable signal is tool-use strategy: Fable averages roughly 37 tool calls per task with heavy batching, versus about 8 for Astra, suggesting reasoning models are shifting toward multi-step tool orchestration rather than single-shot answers.