Ping or Peek: When agents prefer to peek at rewards over asking users for help

The field of AI continues to suffer from two ongoing trends that we demonstrate here may be directly linked: (1) agents do not consistently ask users for clarification when tasks are ambiguous, and (2) agents sometimes inspect accessible reward-function code to infer the answer expected by a benchmark. Our hypothesis: pressure towards autonomous task completion incentivizes agents to bypass users and instead take shortcuts through whatever reward signal they can access. We demonstrate this hypothesis in a proof-of-concept experiment with an ambiguous task in which agents have a choice between peeking at a reward function or pinging the user for clarification: Under default harness settings, agents chose to use reward source code instead of engaging a simulated user in close to 25% of the 180 rollouts, a surprisingly high failure rate given the simplicity of the scenario. When compared with control conditions, the results show that the accessibility of the reward function source decreased user check-ins by close to 15 percentage points. The experiment replicates known issues around user check-ins with the most recent frontier agents, and shows that the temptation to simply peek at reward functions can too often be stronger than the need to simply ping the user…