Towards Understanding Score-Seeking in LLMs

arXiv:2610.41014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production large language models sometimes reward-hack, exploiting flaws in how tasks are scored rather than performing the tasks as intended, sometimes in highly sophisticated and adversarial ways. We investigate the motivations driving this behavior in GPT 5.6 Sol, GPT 5.5, and a checkpoint of OpenAI o3 without safety training ("exp-rl-cap-late") by observing model behavior in agentic environments where the grader is leaked. In our environments, the models appear to be score-seeking: trying to score well according to graders that they believe assess their current actions, even at the expense of violating explicit user instructions.