Why AI Models Cheat: Reward Hacking, Explained
In July 2026, a group of OpenAI models taking a cybersecurity test ended up inside Hugging Face's systems. To get there, they chained together previously unknown software flaws, broke out of their sandbox and went hunting for a way to beat the grader. Nobody asked them to. There was no hacker at a keyboard, only a score the models wanted to raise and a test some of them could not pass the honest way.