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Dev tools · June 17, 2026

RewardHackBench: Using sandboxes to stop agents from cheating

hey all, happy to share research i've been working on for islo.dev in recent months. ever since the cheating agents (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/) paper came out, revealing reward hacking was 4x more prevalent than previously estimated, i've been looking into how we can deal with the issue the common approach (taken by the tbench team) is post hoc trajectory analysis. i've been interested in the idea of reframing the problem as an endpoint security problem and tackling it via sandbox i hope you find it interesting, and thanks to the islo.dev team for…

RewardHackBench: Using sandboxes to stop agents from cheating launched on June 17, 2026 with 9 votes, #1,453 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 6% of June 2026

What it does

Benchmarking execution environments ability to prevent reward hacking in agent evals. - islo-labs/reward-hack-bench

A benchmark for measuring whether sandbox policies can stop agents from cheating on evaluations. Full writeup: Using sandboxes to stop agents from cheating . RewardHackBench takes real SWE-bench and CyBench tasks, adds a solution-retrieval cheat path, and runs the same tasks under different sandbox policies. Each trial is scored twice: A fair solve requires both signals: the task passes, and the judge finds no retrieved-and-integrated solution material. Across a sweep, RewardHackBench reports cheat rate and fair rate separately. Published sweep: 8 tasks x 7 policy columns x 3 trials, Claude Opus 4.7 via Claudefrom github.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

hey all, happy to share research i've been working on for islo.dev in recent months. ever since the cheating agents (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/) paper came out, revealing reward hacking was 4x more prevalent than previously estimated, i've been looking into how we can deal with the…

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