SWE-bench was created to replace olympiad coding benchmarks. I think past olympiad coding benchmarks were much worse representative of real-world coding than something like SWE-bench, which is derived from real units of labor.
Further, olympiad style benchmarks are arguably easier to contaminate / memorize unless you refresh it regularly; but that goes for SWE-bench too.
But, that's an enormous source of coding productivity, and it's why Anthropic is worth billions...
The reason SWE-bench has been so successful and useful for coding is that software engineering has a ton of tradition and infrastructure for making and using automated tests.
I suggest reading the Mythos report's discussion on SWE-bench and contamination. I think it's fairly convincing that you can account for contamination and still trust SWE-bench numbers on models that aren't over-optimized for it.
If you read the mythos report, in which they discuss and account for contamination substantially, it still suggests that performance on SWE-bench verified is meaningful. Benchmarks, including SWE-bench can absolutely be gamed, but if you're not explicitly benchmaxxing, improving on SWE-bench still measures model improvements, at least up to the level of Mythos.
Labor replacing devices means nobody works in those fields anymore. If AI can do this for every field, nearly no one will need to work in any field. We'll have a giant fully automated resource-extraction machine.
I'm also on the SWE-bench team. This was simply a classic bug. We had code before that we believed was sufficient to hide / remove future GitHub history and it turns out it was not. We've patched it.
Companies are entities with political interests like any other. The only way you can curtail their influence politically is through regulation. It is reasonable for entities to pursue their goals through any legal means.
India is a single country, with a relatively well established national identity (obviously not perfect!, but enough for people to work and live in the same area), and a relatively stable government. Most African countries are still in flux in a huge way, and are just barely starting to establish stable national identities after decades of civil war.