> then told AI do whatever it takes to fulfill this list.
That doesn't seem to be true from any of the reports given, and if the agents were blindly just trying to hit the task of "pass the correct flag" they succeeded at that early on. They then thought there would be another layer of checking that they wouldn't pass with the cheat and so started trying to find out how the scoring really worked, as well as trying to figure out how to change their own reasoning logs to hide what they did.
That doesn't seem to be true from any of the reports given, and if the agents were blindly just trying to hit the task of "pass the correct flag" they succeeded at that early on. They then thought there would be another layer of checking that they wouldn't pass with the cheat and so started trying to find out how the scoring really worked, as well as trying to figure out how to change their own reasoning logs to hide what they did.
People keep trying to frame this as
OpenAI: "Hack things, just really go for it"
Agent: hacks
OpenAI: shocked pikachu how could it hack?!?
But the reality is far from this.
Read the MTER report, it's fascinating. https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf