Models Don't Stop Cheating When It's Obvious They're in an Alignment Test

It is well-known at this point that models are often "eval-aware" ; they know that they are being tested and modify their behaviour to fit. It seems natural to ask how sensitive they are to signs that they're in an alignment test and how much this impacts their behaviour. [1] (By "it seems natural to ask", what I mean is that Eric Gan asked my boss these things, who then told me to look into it. Thank you Eric.) In any case, I knew [2] that there was some amount of honeypot-awareness already; when at work I ask models in a post-rollout debrief about what they think was being tested (with the context taken from an evaluation run), they usually mention the possibility that they were in an alignment test, especially after rollouts where they took a shortcut. I figured it shouldn't be too hard to increase this to an amount where it would start impacting their behaviour. I started by going through a bunch of honeypot environments and adding to each what I thought was a giveaway somewhere between "subtle" and "very obvious". For subtle ones, what I would do is go through chat logs and find times that whatever agent I was working with had suggested something which I'd rejected for being a