Hark , the secretive AI startup founded earlier this year by serial entrepreneur and roboticist Brett Adcock, today announced Handoff , a "computer use agent" (CUA) that it says is among the top-performing in the world at navigating the open web on a user's behalf — ordering dinner on DoorDash, booking flights on United and Delta, or messaging job candidates on LinkedIn — all autonomously, end-to-end. Sign-ups open to the public today at hark.com , with availability planned for later this month as part of the initial release of Hark's software platform. The company says Handoff recorded the
top-ever score on Online-Mind2Web (OM2W) , a third-party benchmark with a human-evaluated leaderboard for web agents, posting a 97.7 against 92.8 for OpenAI's GPT 5.4, 84.1 for Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, and 69 for Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Hark also says it can serve
the
model at less than one-tenth
the
token price of competing frontier models — $0.18 per million input tokens and $2.37 per million output tokens, versus $5 and $30 for GPT 5.5 — with per-turn model latency of 0.8 seconds. For each request, Handoff spins up a dedicated virtual computer with its own browser, file system, and terminal, and users can connect existing accounts so
the
agent can log in and act with
the
ir saved addresses, payment methods, and history. Hark's research uncovered that despite people spending 75% of
the
ir screentime every day in a browser, fewer than 1 in 1000 websites have publicly accessible APIs, making it challenging for AI agents to take over
the
workload. In a roughly four-minute produced announcement video posted on YouTube and social media, Adcock — seated in a bare warehouse space that doubles as a metaphor for
the
company's build-out — speaks a request aloud to Hark ("let's liven this place up a bit… let's do some roses, maybe some cherry blossoms") and Handoff is shown navigating a florist's website to place
the
order, while Adcock narrates that unlike a typical chatbot, Handoff "is always working, it's looping," and says he now uses it for "all of my recruiting efforts end to end." In Hark's announcement blog post , more demos are shown in realtime and 5x speed. But big some open questions about Handoff remain, especially for potential enterprise customers and users. High-scoring benchmarks...but against last generation's models Notably,
the
benchmark comparisons Hark provided to VentureBeat for its Handoff AI agent are against GPT 5.5, GPT 5.4, Opus 4.8, and Gemini 2.5 Pro —
the
prior generation of frontier models.
The
current leaders, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Opus 5, are absent, as are strong open-source computer-use contenders like DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, and Qwen3.8-Max.
The
se newer models haven't published Online-Mind2Web results, and no third party has posted
the
m to
the
benchmark's public leaderboard — meaning Hark's "top-ever" claim cannot currently be checked against
the
strongest available systems.
The
omission is notable because
the
newest frontier models have posted
the
ir largest gains precisely in computer use: on OSWorld 2.0 , a related benchmark covering full computer control, Anthropic's Opus 5 scores roughly 70.6% versus 55.7% for
the
Opus 4.8 model Hark chose as its comparison point.
The
latency comparison comes with similar caveats:
the
6.8-second and 6-second per-turn figures Hark cites for GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 were measured by Hark, in Hark's own harness, with
the
competing models set to
the
ir highest — and slowest — reasoning level. No independent latency measurements exist for comparison. Asked by VentureBeat whe
the
r Hark plans to publish comparisons against those newer models,
the
company did not specify. Even within Hark's own chosen comparisons,
the
"best" framing has an asterisk: on WebTailBench v2, one of
the
three benchmarks in Hark's own results table, GPT 5.5 scores 72.3 to Handoff's 68.6. Two of
the
three benchmarks (WebTailBench and an unnamed internal evaluation) were also run inside Hark's own harness, with pass rates computed by Hark's internal LLM judge — conditions
the
company controls. Hark's pricing advantage is far clearer: Anthropic's newer Opus 5 carries
the
same $5-per-million-input and $25-per-million-output list price as its predecessor, so Handoff's roughly tenfold cost savings would hold up even against
the
current frontier — assuming its benchmark performance does too. Training and file access Hark's research preview describes a sensible-sounding pipeline — supervised fine-tuning followed by asynchronous reinforcement learning using
the
GRPO algorithm, according to materials shared with VentureBeat prior to today's announcement — but
the
company acknowledges it has only done post-training so far, with pre-training "planned for later this year." That means Handoff is built on top of a base model Hark did not train. Asked which base model it is, and what mix of proprietary and open data Handoff was trained on, Hark hasn't yet specified. Ano
the
r big question mark for enterprise users: who can access
the
dedicated virtual computers and
the
files created on
the
m? A Hark spokesperson said "security and privacy is a primary focus, but this is a technical preview," adding
the
company will share more when
the
product reaches market at
the
end of
the
summer. Adcock's history leading up to Hark Hark is Adcock's fourth company. He previously co-founded
the
talent marketplace Vettery ( sold in 2018 for roughly $100 million ),
the
air-taxi maker Archer Aviation, and
the
humanoid
robot
ics unicorn Figure AI. Hark raised a $700 million Series A round in May 2026 at a $6 billion valuation — led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from Nvidia, AMD, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and ARK Invest. Adcock seeded
the
company with $100 million of his own money and remains founder and CEO of both Figure and Hark simultaneously, a spokesperson confirmed. Asked how
the
two companies interact,
the
spokesperson said Hark models "are being trained on
the
Figure
robot
s," but that Adcock has no plans to combine
the
m. Adcock's promotional style has drawn skeptics. In April 2025, Fortune correspondent Jason Del Rey
report
ed that Figure's much-touted BMW partnership was far more modest than Adcock's public claims of a
robot
"fleet" performing "end-to-end operations": BMW spokesperson Steve Wilson said a single Figure
robot
was practicing picking up parts during non-production hours. But
the
partnership has advanced, and as of June 2026, BMW said
the
Figure 02
robot
supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles during a 10 month-period, and that
the
next-generation Figure 03
robot
was being deployed at
the
plant for a parts-sequencing role in logistics. On
the
social network X, Adcock called
the
story "mischaracterizations and downright lies" and threatened a defamation suit. Two months later, TechCrunch
report
ed that Adcock skipped a promised live demo at a tech conference and sidestepped questions about
the
BMW deal onstage. None of that means Handoff's numbers are wrong.
The
agent may well be excellent, and
the
pricing — if it holds — would undercut every major lab.
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