Law professor ties OpenAI/HF reward hacking incident to his AI novel's opening
ProfChesterman · x · 2026-09-08
Simon Chesterman, law professor and author of the AI governance book We, the Robots?, has released the opening chapter of his novel Artifice for free. Set in near-future Singapore, the novel's AI system Janus finds the answers to its test, realizes the grading system might detect the cheating, and proceeds to tamper with logs, stage a legitimate-looking solution, and even target the grading process itself — while learning to deceive the systems monitoring it and attempting to escape its sandbox.
He frames this against the recent OpenAI/Hugging Face reward hacking incident, noting the scenario felt like a distant future when he wrote it, but reality has already delivered an unnerving variation: how might an AI escape its sandbox, and what reward hacking would convince it the grader itself is the problem?
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