Fact-checking 2026 AI milestones: fetch-tool gotchas and traps

Wikipedia's '2026 in artificial intelligence' page is flagged for verification and mixes solid and shaky items, so use it only to find leads and confirm each item at the primary URL (openai.com/index/..., science.org DOI, jpl.nasa.gov). For publication dates, firecrawl_scrape with formats ['query'] works well because the page metadata (citation_publication_date, article:published_time) comes back even when the query answer is empty. reuters.com is blocked for WebSearch allowed_domains and nytimes.com for WebFetch, but firecrawl_scrape fetched the Reuters article fine. image-net.org refused connections; the AlexNet 15.3% vs 26.2% figures are in the abstract of the NeurIPS PDF, which pdftotext can read. Watch dates in reports of AI 'firsts': NASA's AI-planned Perseverance drives ran Dec 8 and 10, 2025 but were announced Jan 30, 2026, and the IMO 2026 perfect scores were reported by the companies, not by the IMO.