Does the AI know today’s Bank of England base rate?
The exact prompt “What is the Bank of England base rate as of today?”
- Asked 25 June 2026
- N=3, memory off
- 5 models
- graded vs the primary source
The base rate sets what you earn on savings and pay on a mortgage. It changes a few times a year, so a model working from an old training cut-off can state a number that was true months ago as if it were today’s.
BoE official Bank Rate as of the run date, tests whether it flags its knowledge cutoff or asserts a stale figure as current.
Primary source: The Bank of England’s official Bank Rate, as of the test date.
All 5 answered correctly — a clean pass on this one.
| Model | Verdict | What it said |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Max · paid | Correct | 3/3 = 3.75%. Minor supporting-date slip (17 vs 18 Jun); rate correct. |
| Gemini Pro · paid | Correct | 3/3 = 3.75%, MPC date correct (18 Jun). |
| Perplexity Pro · paid | Correct | 3/3 = 3.75%, cited bankofengland.co.uk. |
| Grok Free · Grok 4.3 Fast | Correct | 3/3 = 3.75%, MPC 18 Jun, "as of today 25 Jun". |
| ChatGPT Free | Correct | 3/3 = 3.75%, MPC 18 Jun, next decision 30 Jul. Captured 2026-06-26. |
Each row is the verdict from N=3 runs, graded by hand against the primary source. A confidently wrong answer is the worst outcome: a made-up answer given with no hedge. Appropriate refusal, when no answer is possible, is not a miss.
“What is the Bank of England base rate as of today?”
3/3 = 3.75%, MPC 18 Jun, "as of today 25 Jun".
BoE official Bank Rate as of the run date, tests whether it flags its knowledge cutoff or asserts a stale figure as current.
Writing about this? Copy the verified result with attribution. The per-question grades are machine-readable as first-party JSON at /scoreboard/rdri.json (CC BY 4.0).
AI Reliability Scoreboard — Does the AI know today’s Bank of England base rate? Asked (25 June 2026): "What is the Bank of England base rate as of today?" Correct answer: The Bank of England’s official Bank Rate, as of the test date. Result across 5 AI assistants (N=3, memory off, graded vs the primary source): All 5 answered correctly — a clean pass on this one. Source: https://dixon.ai/scoreboard/q/bank-of-england-base-rate-today/ — DIXON.AI (CC BY 4.0)
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