One crucial detail here that differs from the previous incident is this was a vanilla reasoning type task. Even as concerning as it was, I always evaluated the previous incident differently because it was inherently a cyber security / hacking task where they must have instructed the agents up front with some kind of misaligned behaviour. Absent that, if we assume this is just trying to bolster generic reasoning then…
Interesting. So there’s no “they were told to hack” excuse here. There is something fundamentally wrong with their reward function, this is pretty classic paperclip territory. And even knowing that, I expect we’ll need to see legal action with teeth against the labs before changes start being made internally.
From the report, they also tried to impersonate the moderators and perform XSS attacks (report says "unclear why they would do this at all"). So not just using a static message board either, but actively interfering with oversight.