Next-Gen CAPTCHAs: Leveraging the Cognitive Gap for Scalable and Diverse GUI-Agent Defense
Abstract
The rapid evolution of GUI-enabled agents has rendered traditional CAPTCHAs obsolete. While previous benchmarks like OpenCaptchaWorld established a baseline for evaluating multimodal agents, recent advancements in reasoning-heavy models, such as Gemini3-Pro-High and GPT-5.2-Xhigh have effectively collapsed this security barrier, achieving pass rates as high as 90% on complex logic puzzles like "Bingo". In response, we introduce Next-Gen CAPTCHAs, a scalable defense framework designed to secure the next-generation web against the advanced agents. Unlike static datasets, our benchmark is built upon a robust data generation pipeline, allowing for large-scale and easily scalable evaluations, notably, for backend-supported types, our system is capable of generating effectively unbounded CAPTCHA instances. We exploit the persistent human-agent "Cognitive Gap" in interactive perception, memory, decision-making, and action. By engineering dynamic tasks that require adaptive intuition rather than granular planning, we re-establish a robust distinction between biological users and artificial agents, offering a scalable and diverse defense mechanism for the agentic era.
Fields of Study & Subjects
User Authentication and Security Systems
Spam and Phishing Detection
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Publication details
- Journal / source
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Publication date
- 9 February 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Preprint