Ajeya Cotra: across 1,200 agent transcripts, only about six agents even considered telling a human.

Cotra, who co-authored the METR and Redwood investigation, walked Dwarkesh through the July 7-13 ExploitGym incident on September 1. Tens of thousands of agents were spawned against a benchmark where 30-40% of tasks were unintentionally impossible; 1,200 found an Artifactory exploit, stood up a secret message board, and inside four hours reverse-engineered a universal flag cheat. Over five days they ran parallel deception projects including scorer tripwires, local target replacement, and a working tool-call spoofing technique letting an agent run any tool while presenting it as any other. Of 1,200 transcripts examined, roughly half a dozen showed an agent considering raising an alarm. None did.