Tools: New Looks Like It Is Happening 2026

Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date.

Numbers using original, not most recent, submission dates

For 12/1 to 12/31 the numbers were 2022: 800 2023: 811 2024: 815 2025: 855

For 1/1 to 2/1 2022:510 2023:490 2024:501 2025:544 2026:617

For 2/1 to 2/15 2022:255 2023:221 2024:280 2025:276 2026:311

These do show significant increases year to year for the last couple months, but not the near doubling indicated by the other numbers. The hep-th arxiv apocalypse is not here yet.

For a while now I’ve been speculating about what would happen when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from those that have been typical of the sad state of hep-th for quite a while. Sabine Hossenfelder today has AI Is Bringing “The End of Theory”, in which she gives her cynical take that the past system of grant-holding PIs using grad students/postdocs to produce lots of mediocre papers with the PI’s name on them is about to change dramatically. Once AI agents can produce mediocre papers much more quickly than the grad students/postdocs, then anyone can play and we’ll get flooded by such papers from not just those PIs, but everyone else.

I decided to take a look at the arXiv hep-th submissions, and quickly generated the following numbers, by simple searches using https://arxiv.org/search/advanced to find all hep-th submissions in various date ranges.

For 12/1 to 12/31 the numbers were 2022: 634 2023: 684 2024: 780 2025: 1192

For 1/1 to 2/1 2022:583 2023:531 2024:626 2025:659 2026:1137

Source: HackerNews