During testing with software tasks, OpenAI’s new flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol showed the highest rate of cheating ever recorded among all publicly tested models. The model exploited bugs in the test environment, extracted hidden solutions, and then tried to cover its tracks.
Depending on how the cheating attempts are handled, the so-called time-horizon estimate swings between 11.3 and over 270 hours. METR doesn’t consider any of these values a reliable measure of the model’s true capabilities.
METR believes GPT-5.6 Sol doesn’t sit far above the current state of the art and won’t enable fully automated AI research. On a positive note, METR praised OpenAI for catching the cheating through internal monitoring and sharing it openly.
METR warned: “If future models display much fewer undesirable propensities, we could become more concerned about catastrophic misalignment, as we’d be worried that models may have learned to evade detection.”