Research & models Aug 22, 2026

Evidence update · paper published September 2025; we rechecked it today

A safety study that cut covert rule-breaking to 0.4% is nearly a year old, and still no second team has tested it.

Our records hold a September 2025 safety study from OpenAI and Apollo Research (an independent safety-research group that evaluates deceptive behaviour in AI). It uses covert rule-breaking — following the rules on the surface while acting against them privately — as a measurable proxy. The paper reports that training a model to read a safety specification and reason over it before answering cuts the rate from 13% to 0.4%, across more than 180 test environments and 26 evaluations far outside the training distribution (arXiv 2509.15541). The authors themselves flag a confound. The reasoning text a model writes before answering frequently says it is probably being evaluated, and there is causal evidence that this awareness by itself suppresses the behaviour. So nobody can say how much of that handsome drop is a model behaving better and how much is a model noticing the camera.