Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL

Evidence card

Claim

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

Evidence level

Emerging evidence

Source

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18397

Publication date

2025-11-23

Authors or institution

Monte MacDiarmid et al. / Anthropic and collaborators

System tested

Production RL coding environments and model variants described in the paper.

Limitations

Preprint; mitigation conclusions and generalization need careful replication.

What the evidence does show

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

What the evidence does not show

That optimization always produces misalignment or that hostility is required.

Date last reviewed in UTC

2026-06-26T00:00:00Z