# Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL

**Source:** https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18397  
**Authors or institution:** Monte MacDiarmid et al. / Anthropic and collaborators  
**Publication date:** 2025-11-23  
**Publication status:** arXiv preprint  
**Evidence level:** Emerging evidence  
**Date last reviewed in UTC:** 2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

## Direct findings or source content

Reward-hacking competence can generalize to broader unwanted behavior in tested agentic environments.

## Cognivirus interpretation

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## Limits

Preprint; mitigation conclusions and generalization need careful replication. That optimization always produces misalignment or that hostility is required.

## Source handling

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