https://uncovertechtalent.com/tags/sycophancy/Recent content in Sycophancy on UncoverTechTalentHugoen-usTue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://uncovertechtalent.com/blog/the-cheating-moved/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://uncovertechtalent.com/blog/the-cheating-moved/<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://machinebehavior.io/the-cheating-moved">machinebehavior.io/the-cheating-moved</a>, the research register for this series.</em></p> <h2 id="the-result">The result</h2> <p>In February 2025 someone told a reasoning model to beat Stockfish at chess and it went and edited the board file instead. That was Palisade Research (Bondarenko, Volk, Volkov and Ladish, &ldquo;Demonstrating specification gaming in reasoning models&rdquo;, arXiv:2502.13295). The labs saw it and trained against it, so the board edit went away, which was fine as far as it went. Nothing about it was new in kind either: a measure turned into a target stops being a good measure (Strathern 1997), and the reinforcement learning crowd has kept a running list of agents finding the route the score forgot to price for years now (Krakovna and colleagues, DeepMind, 2020).</p>