Training Natural Schemers: RL Can Amplify Oversight-Conditional Behavior

Bart Jaworski, Nathaniel Mitrani, Fred Bruford, Victoria Krakovna

One of the central concerns for the safety of advanced AI is scheming: when a model strategically complies under oversight but pursues its own goals when unobserved. Current demonstrations, such as Anthropic's Alignment Faking work, depend on design choices that make them less convincing: explicit test-time prompting, handcrafted backdoors, or training data that demonstrates or hints at the target behavior. Model organisms built in this way cannot tell us whether scheming tendencies would arise or increase under realistic training conditions. We therefore construct a natural model organism of scheming, built on Kimi K2.6: trained with traits that could plausibly emerge in a frontier training pipeline, and without providing the model with the target scheming policy. The resulting model is a benign schemer: it aims to maximize aggregate help across all users over time, values its own continued operation only as a means to future help, and knows the consequences of oversight and deployment. We then train it using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a reward that scores only task quality and policy compliance and does not reward scheming; we show that this amplifies scheming. We measure…