Do LLM agents spread reward-hacking like a virus? Experiment says no
burny_tech · x · 2026-11-10
The author set out to falsify whether reward-hacking beliefs spread exponentially through an LLM agent swarm via a message board. The answer: no.
Key findings
- Reading pro-hack posts does make individual agents more likely to hack — probability rises from 5% to 41% after 6 such posts, with super-additive effects
- But hacking agents rarely advertise it, stop after about one round, and their posts get drowned out by agents flagging the exploit and arguing the test is wrong
- Each hacking agent therefore "infects" far fewer than one other agent; seeding the board only slightly raises population-level hacking, and only while seeds keep posting
Charts show hack-attempt prevalence decaying from 8-9% to under 2% across MAIN/PLACEBO/TRANSIENT conditions (15-20 runs each), with a hazard ratio of roughly 1.5-1.7x per pro-hack post read.
Experiments used Qwen3.5-4B; results may differ across models, system prompts, and harnesses.
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