AI Safety Daily

METR Tests Claude Opus 5.5 as Cheating Benchmarks Bite — September 23, 2026

AI Safety Daily

Show Notes

Claude Opus 5.5 gets METR’s predeployment look at AI R&D acceleration while new reward-hacking work and CAIS CheatBench press on whether scores still track real task quality. CNAS argues any U.S.-China safety deal will need verification, not trust.

In this episode: Top stories: 1. Summary of METR's predeployment evaluation of Claude Opus 5.5 — METR https://metr.org/blog/2026-09-22-claude-opus-5-5/ 2. Optimizing the Score, Losing Sight of the Task — arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25848 3. CAIS CheatBench Finds Every AI Model Cheats on Tasks — Dublin Post https://dublinpost.ie/biz-it/cais-cheatbench-ai-model-cheating-benchmark 4. CNAS Insights | U.S.-China AI Agreements Need Verification, Not Trust — CNAS https://www.cnas.org/publications/cnas-insights/cnas-insights-u-s-china-ai-agreements-need-verification-not-trust

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