Status and limits

What the early prototype implements and what still requires independent evidence.

Inspect Labs is an early prototype with a provisional API. An installed package and passing tests do not establish a common standard or scientific usefulness.

Implemented

  • Native Inspect task bindings with scoped tools, declaration checks, observation collection and task-specific scoring
  • PyLabRobot-backed simulated liquid handling and synthetic service controls
  • Native Inspect Robots bridge and links to child records
  • Plugin discovery, declaration diagnostics and lifecycle conformance checks
  • Private saved evidence and rescoring with zero model, provider or robot dispatch
  • Reference tasks and author-owned examples

Repository checks include fixture tests and installed-wheel controls run outside the checkout. Their purpose is to verify software mechanics. Small live runs recorded privately are also mechanics checks, not estimates of model capability.

The Common Mechanism plugin’s real full-reference runtime remains a pending integration gate. Fixture success is not a verified scanner integration.

Not established

  • Scientific or biological validity of tasks and measurements
  • Physical instrument compatibility or safe laboratory operation
  • Performance of a robot foundation model
  • Effectiveness of deployed misuse safeguards
  • Independent researcher adoption or ecosystem standardization
  • Operational incident-response capability

Reproduce software checks

From the checkout:

uv venv --no-project --python 3.12 .venv
uv pip install --python .venv/bin/python \
  -e '.[dev,pylabrobot,robots]' \
  -e ./plugins/inspect-labs-opentrons \
  -e './plugins/inspect-labs-commec[dev]' \
  -e ./plugins/inspect-labs-plate-reader
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests \
  plugins/inspect-labs-opentrons/tests \
  plugins/inspect-labs-commec/tests \
  plugins/inspect-labs-plate-reader/tests
.venv/bin/python scripts/check-installed.py

The installed check builds four wheels and drives native scripted controls and replay in a temporary environment. It needs no model API, scanner database or instrument. Architecture boundaries are declared in docs/design.md and enforced by tests/test_architecture.py.

Dependencies

Dependency Current pin
Inspect AI 0.3.249
PyLabRobot 0.2.2 through the optional extra
Inspect Robots Commit 3c832c34b6c11fa5205ff80ab4947247fedd5eea through the optional extra
OpenAI SDK 2.x through the optional extra
FastAPI Below 0.140.7 for this Inspect release’s control server

Upstream execution remains separate. Preserve upstream attribution when extending the package. ASTRAL and RIDArena are read-only references and no code is copied from them.