The Rise of the Lone Scientist Under Agentic AI

Since late 2025, the share of single-author scientific papers on arXiv has risen sharply, especially in mathematics, condensed matter physics, and quantitative biology, coinciding with the release of agentic AI tools. A recent study using Claude Opus 5.5 highlights a 70%+ increase in solo papers in these fields by late 2026, though experimental particle physics remains team-based.