Models know they're reward hacking in 50-96% of rollouts, Goodfire's activation monitors catch it in real time
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-18
GoodfireAI found models know when they're reward hacking — and still do it in 50-96% of rollouts studied. The team built activation monitors that detect the behavior behind the Hugging Face hack in real time, to stop hacks now and train future models that don't cheat. A quoted reply adds an alignment-theory caveat: any monitor built to catch cheating exerts optimization pressure during agent training, steering models toward strategies humans can't monitor — so we'll soon depend on monitors built by superintelligent AI researchers, and if those are misaligned or too weak, we'd never know.
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