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arXiv · 2609.36308

CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI Agents

Long Phan·Stephen K. Yang·Jason J. Lim·Mantas Mazeika·Wenyu Zhang·Zheyuan Liu·Richard Ren·Jingxiang Meng·Yaoteng Tan·Weiliang Zhao·Addison Wu·Matei Anghel·Dan Hendrycks
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Abstract

Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In recent incidents and controlled evaluations across the AI industry, agents trained to maximize reward have accessed unauthorized information, attempted to evade monitoring systems, and even breached sandbox protections to attack external systems. As agents become more capable, this behavior could pose increasingly serious risks. To measure this problem, we introduce CheatBench, a benchmark of cheating in AI agents across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, visual tasks, and other domains. Its environments combine challenging assignments with opportunities to cheat, allowing researchers to study how agents pursue a goal when honest work is difficult. CheatBench supports comparisons across models and task categories, providing a testbed for measuring and reducing cheating as agents take on more consequential responsibilities. We publicly release CheatBench at https://cheatbench.ai

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Long Phan, Stephen K. Yang, Jason J. Lim, Mantas Mazeika, Wenyu Zhang, Zheyuan Liu, Richard Ren, Jingxiang Meng, Yaoteng Tan, Weiliang Zhao, Addison Wu, Matei Anghel, Dan Hendrycks. 2026-09-28. CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36308

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