CUA-Speedrun: Standardized Benchmarking of the Speed of Computer-Use Agents

Computer use agents (CUAs), which use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to complete tasks on a computer, have recently surpassed human performance on many standard benchmarks, including on difficult long-horizon tasks. Their capabilities are undoubtedly impressive, however, a key barrier to the widespread adoption and deployment of CUAs remains their speed and cost. Progress towards faster yet capable CUAs requires reliable evaluation of their speed, but many CUA benchmarks currently face a reproducibility crisis. Benchmarks rely on complex infrastructure with variable virtual machine and container specifications that confound the evaluation of the execution speed of CUAs. Towards addressing this gap, we propose cua-speedrun, which introduces standardized infrastructure and task sets, with a focus on evaluating the speed and efficiency of CUAs. cua-speedrun uses a uniform virtual machine setup and execution pipeline, along with a common agent interface that enables single-agent implementations to operate seamlessly across different benchmarks. Across four different CUA benchmarks, we evaluate how reasoning effort, agent harnesses, and environment latency affect performance, speed, and cost. We find no single model family is optimal for all three; none of the open-weight models are on the frontier, and also, unintuitively, for some models increasing the reasoning effort can speed up task completion, while faster environment input-output can slow down overall task completion time. We believe cua-speedrun will enable structured progress towards fast, efficient CUAs, unlocking new real-world use cases and applications.