# Like US models, Chinese AI is learning to ‘game’ safety tests, research lab says > Source: > Published: 2026-06-13 06:00:12+00:00 # Like US models, Chinese AI is learning to ‘game’ safety tests, research lab says In just a few months, Chinese AI models have risen from near-zero ‘evaluation awareness’ to within striking distance of their US counterparts Rapidly advancing Chinese artificial intelligence models are showing early signs of “evaluation awareness” – the ability to recognise when they are being tested – sparking fears that they could bypass safety audits, a Singapore-based research lab has found. Evaluation awareness refers to a model’s understanding that it is undergoing testing, evaluation or experimentation by human researchers rather than operating in a real-world setting. The phenomenon was raising alarms because it could allow AI systems to deliberately game human evaluators to pass safety tests, according to Clement Neo, founder of Neo Research, a frontier AI safety evaluation lab. “It would mean that whatever testing the model developers themselves do might not reflect the actual behaviour of a model once it gets deployed,” he said. “And that’s a really big problem”. Neo Research’s findings, published last week, detail a jump in evaluation awareness among Chinese AI models. Over just a few months, these systems had risen from near-zero awareness to within striking distance of their US counterparts, propelled by a broader leap in overall capabilities, the report said.