Can AI reviewers match expert scientists at peer review?

Seungone Kim, Dongkeun Yoon, Kiril Gashteovski, Juyoung Suk, Jinheon Baek, Pranjal Aggarwal, Ian Wu, Viktor Zaverkin, Spase Petkoski, Daniel R. Schrider, Ilija Dukovski, Francesco Santini, Biljana Mitreska, Yong Jeong, Kyeongha Kwon, Young Min Sim, Dragana Manasova, Arthur Porto, Biljana Mojsoska, Makoto Takamoto, Marko Shuntov, Ruoqi Liu, Hyunjoo Jenny Lee, Niyazi Ulas Dinç, Yehhyun Jo, Sunkyu Han, Chungwoo Lee, Huishan Li, Esther H. R. Tsai, Ergun Simsek, Khushboo Shafi, Yeonseung Chung, Jihye Park, Aleksandar Shulevski, Henrik Christiansen, Yoosang Son, Elly Knight, Amanda Montoya, Jeongyoun Ahn, Christian Langkammer, Heera Moon, Changwon Yoon, Nikola Stikov, Mooseok Jang, Edward Choi, Junhan Kim, Yeon Sik Jung, Woo Youn Kim, Jae Kyoung Kim, Ishraq Md Anjum, Hyun Uk Kim, Drew Bridges, Carolin Lawrence, Xiang Yue, Alice Oh, Akari Asai, Sean Welleck, Graham Neubig

Researchers had 45 domain scientists rate 2,960 individual criticisms from human and AI reviews of 82 Nature papers, scoring them on correctness, significance, and evidence quality. The best AI system exceeded the average human reviewer and caught issues humans missed, but all three AI models (GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5) showed identical recurring weaknesses—poor subfield knowledge, trouble tracking context across multiple files, and overcriticism of minor flaws. AI reviewers work best as a complement to humans, not a replacement.