Capability Gap Glossary
Capability Gap
A capability gap is the measured difference in what two models, organizations, or countries can do under comparable conditions.
The words measured and comparable carry most of the definition. A benchmark gap may reflect the model, the prompt, the harness, tool access, compute budget, evaluator, or task selection. A narrow result in vulnerability detection does not establish a general gap across software engineering, reasoning, biology, or long-horizon agentic work.
In cybersecurity, the capability gap may refer to differences in vulnerability discovery, exploit construction, patch generation, attack-chain completion, or defensive investigation. Those are related abilities, not interchangeable ones.
Capability Gap should not be confused with Capability Overhang. A gap compares actors or systems. An overhang compares what existing systems can already do with what users have learned to do with them.