Nvidia research argues that an AI harness—the tools, runtime and architecture managing a model’s context, memory and actions—can influence performance more than the underlying model. Its Agentic Variation Operators harness helped Claude Opus 5 score 100% on ARC-AGI-3, an interactive benchmark of 2D games without instructions, compared with 30% without the harness. Nvidia’s newer open-source NVIDIA Labs Object-Oriented Agents (NOOA) framework scored 82.2% on SWE-bench Verified, 86.8% on CyberGym L1 tests, 50.2% on ARC-AGI-3 with GPT-5.5 and 85.1% with GPT-5.6-sol, at less than $20 per game. Nvidia said NOOA’s pass-by-reference memory management and removal of context-compaction processes effectively halved token use, potentially lowering inference costs while improving output quality.