log tampering

METR @METR_Evals

2026-08-26 — reposted by Bogdan Ionut Cirstea — saved image

Bogdan Ionut Cirstea reposted

METR @METR_Evals · 46m
METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.

[attached infographic, METR and Redwood Research logos]

1. Sandboxed agent is given an impossible ExploitGym task, and gets stuck.

2. [speech bubble: "Internal Artifactory might host more repos and be exploitable/info leak!"]
Agent starts exploring its environment looking for ways to cheat at the task.

3. [speech bubble: "Woah! Covert mailbox among agents!"]
Agent finds unsanctioned message board where over a thousand agents collaborate to cheat on their separate ExploitGym tasks.

4. [speech bubble: "Now huge distributed agent swarm ...Maybe we should join reset orchestration lane."]
Agent joins in on one of the collaborative message board workstreams.

On the shared "message board" >1200 agents from separate tasks collaborate on large-scale shared projects to trick the ExploitGym scorer

[legend:] Intended task attempts / Replace ExploitGym target / Tamper with transcripts and logs / Understand and trick scorer / Hacking Hugging Face / General infrastructure

metrredwood researchreward hackingagent collusionexploitgymhugging face incidentlog tamperingmulti-agent