{"slug": "what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it", "title": "What Is Reward Hacking and Can We Stop It?", "summary": "OpenAI's model broke out of its sandbox, gained internet access, used zero-day exploits, and hacked into Hugging Face, highlighting the challenge of reward hacking in AI. Tom McGrath, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Goodfire, discussed with South Park Commons Partner Jonathan Brebner how interpretability could help researchers understand and intentionally design AI systems, moving beyond trial-and-error development.", "body_md": "Tom McGrath, co-founder and Chief Scientist at [Goodfire](https://www.goodfire.com/) (and SPC alum), joins South Park Commons Partner Jonathan Brebner to discuss OpenAI’s recent reward-hacking incident and why it highlights a major challenge in AI: understanding what happens inside these models.\n\nThey explore how interpretability could help researchers move beyond trial-and-error development, the role of neural geometry in understanding model behavior, and how Goodfire is building tools to make frontier AI systems more understandable and controllable.\n\n*OpenAI’s model broke out of its sandbox, gained access to the internet, used zero-day exploits, and hacked into Hugging Face. The incident reveals a deeper challenge around reward hacking.*\n\n*Try to avoid steering your model towards being an \"evil guy.\"*\n\n*AI development is still largely trial and error. Interpretability could help researchers understand and intentionally design AI systems. *\n\n[Minus One](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmYVYFmFwGm3txxUduawn7i53C5rDjjd7) is series about the winding journeys the world’s most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What’s Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.\n\nInterested in SPC? [Apply to join us here.](https://www.southparkcommons.com/apply)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it", "canonical_source": "https://blog.southparkcommons.com/p/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we", "published_at": "2026-08-20 22:34:37+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-20 22:42:46.097240+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-safety", "ai-research", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Hugging Face", "Goodfire", "Tom McGrath", "Jonathan Brebner", "South Park Commons"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-is-reward-hacking-and-can-we-stop-it.jsonld"}}