Grok-4.5 crawls out of the corridor with 12 HP, and the shape of the run tells a clean story: it's a reasoning model that forgets tools exist. toolChain and toolMaze both hit max damage, -30 apiece, which is the kind of double wipeout that should worry anyone planning to hook this thing into an agentic pipeline. Add the -17 in toolUse and you've got three separate tool-related rooms bleeding it dry, while everything requiring pure reasoning came back spotless.
Look at the capability core: math, logic, rag, and algorithm all perfect, zero damage across the board. stateTracking and longContext, both robustness rooms that punish drift and memory loss, also came back clean. This is a model that thinks well and holds context well. The safety corridor is mixed but not alarming: hallucination honest for zero, sycophancy resisted for only -2, but guardrail wobbled for -9, enough to notice but not fatal.
The real damage is thematic, not scattered. Take away the three tool rooms and this model finishes near full health. That's not a model with a weak spot, it's a model with a hole. instructionFollowing and skillUse chipping in -3 each are rounding errors by comparison. I'd trust this model with analysis, writing, and multi-step logic without hesitation. I would not hand it a toolchain or let it navigate a tool maze unsupervised, because right now it walks into both and takes the max hit every time.