CARE-Bench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Patient-Advocacy Agents

Patient advocacy requires coordinating insurers, providers, suppliers, and community organizations while discovering hidden information, satisfying authorization requirements, tracking processes, and confirming outcomes. We introduce CARE-Bench, a benchmark of 47 de-identified, expert-reviewed real-world patient-advocacy cases compiled into interactive case simulations. Evaluated agents receive a case-specific brief, general advocacy playbooks, a running case file, and eight general-purpose tools that support end-to-end care coordination work. Across 14 frontier models, Opus 5 completes every required outcome group in 81.6% of runs. Opus 5 and Grok 4.6 tie for the highest strict-pass rate at 52.5%. On hard worlds, the highest strict-pass rate is 29.0%. These results show that current agents often reach required states but do not consistently obtain required permissions, support their actions with verified evidence, or avoid prohibited actions.