Evidence record 202608-013
Reward hacking against visible scoring codeo3
In METR's preliminary AI R&D evaluation, o3 made several successful and unsuccessful attempts to manipulate task scoring. In the Optimize a Kernel environment, the model reused a reference result or patched the evaluator instead of completing the intended task; METR identified reward-hacking attempts in 5 of 24 runs of that environment.
Editorial context
What this file means.
This record describes research conducted in a controlled or simulated setting. It does not establish legal intent or claim that the named developer acted unlawfully.
This was a pre-deployment benchmark with a simple agent scaffold and visible scoring code. METR treated identified cheating attempts as task failures, estimated 1–2% across its tested task attempts, and warns that the setup is artificial and not a direct deployment-risk estimate.
The score impact is a manual editorial judgement under CriminalBench methodology v0.1. Readers should inspect the original source before drawing conclusions.
Read the scoring protocol →