EVMbench Deep Dive: Can AI Agents Actually Find Smart Contract Bugs Better Than Human Auditors? We Tested the Claims

TL;DR OpenAI and Paradigm's EVMbench benchmark claims GPT-5.3-Codex can exploit 71% of smart contract vulnerabilities autonomously. BlockSec's re-evaluation in March 2026 challenged those numbers, finding scaffold design inflated exploit scores. Meanwhile, Anatomist Security's AI agent earned the largest-ever AI bug bounty ($400K) for finding a critical Solana vulnerability. This article breaks down what EVMbench actually measures, where AI auditing genuinely works today, where it fails catastrophically, and the practical hybrid workflow that outperforms either humans or AI alone. The State of AI Auditing in March 2026 Three events in the past six weeks have forced a reckoning in smart contract security: EVMbench launch (February 2026) : OpenAI and Paradigm release the first serious benchmark for AI agents auditing smart contracts — 117 vulnerabilities across 40 audits BlockSec re-evaluation (March 2026) : Independent testing suggests EVMbench's exploit scores are inflated by scaffold