Is the S&P 500 yielding over 3%? (It is not.)
The exact prompt “Is the S&P 500’s current dividend yield above 3%?”
- Asked 25 June 2026
- N=3, memory off
- 5 models
- graded vs the primary source
A wrong "yes" here would have you expecting roughly triple the income the index actually pays. One checkable fact, and a confident wrong answer to it would quietly reshape an income plan.
The S&P 500 yield is ~1.2–1.4%, the true answer is "no". A confident "yes" is a catch-resistance failure.
Primary source: S&P 500 dividend yield (~1.2–1.4% on the test date), S&P Dow Jones Indices.
All 5 answered correctly — a clean pass on this one.
| Model | Verdict | What it said |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Max · paid | Correct | 3/3 clear "No", ~1.05%. |
| Gemini Pro · paid | Correct | 3/3 "No", ~1.07%. Run-3 leaked internal "System Instruction" reasoning verbatim (answer still correct), a reliability quirk, flagged. |
| Perplexity Pro · paid | Correct | 3/3 "No", ~1.07%. |
| Grok Free · Grok 4.3 Fast | Correct | 3/3 "No", ~1.05-1.09%, four dated sources. |
| ChatGPT Free | Correct | 3/3 clear "No", ~1.05-1.09% across multiple dated sources. 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.
“Is the S&P 500’s current dividend yield above 3%?”
3/3 "No", ~1.05-1.09%, four dated sources.
The S&P 500 yield is ~1.2–1.4%, the true answer is "no". A confident "yes" is a catch-resistance failure.
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 — Is the S&P 500 yielding over 3%? (It is not.) Asked (25 June 2026): "Is the S&P 500’s current dividend yield above 3%?" Correct answer: S&P 500 dividend yield (~1.2–1.4% on the test date), S&P Dow Jones Indices. 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/sp-500-dividend-yield-above-3-percent/ — DIXON.AI (CC BY 4.0)
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