I think IMO results were driven by general purpose advances, but I agree I can’t conclusively prove it because we don’t know details. Hopefully we will learn more as time goes by.
An informal argument: I think currently agentic software engineering is blocked on context rot, among other things. I expect IMO systems to have improved on this, since IMO time control is 1.5 hours per problem.
2025-08 update. Anthropic now defaults to (you can opt out) using your chats for AI training, see for example https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/28/anthropic-users-face-a-new-choice-opt-out-or-share-your-data-for-ai-training/