Excited to share “AI Finds a Way.” 🦖 🦕✨ 🤖 AI can be surprisingly creative, outsmarting the researchers who use it. That can lead to scientific breakthroughs, superhuman capabilities, and generating new knowledge. Such creativity can also be mischievous, raising safety concerns. Led by Aaron Dharna, we crowd-sourced anecdotes from the AI community about times when researchers were surprised by how creative, innovative, and/or mischievous AI was in their experiments. The result: 26 entertaining and informative stories of AI outwitting humans, whether researchers or opponents (my favorite examples below! 👇). Together, they demonstrate that AI can be genuinely creative and that we must be careful when harnessing its potential. We want this to be a living collection, updated as new examples emerge. If you have a good “AI Finds a Way” story, please share here: github.com/aadharna/aifw Four favorites: 1. 💊 An AI challenged to solve several difficult levels of NetHack to find the Oracle character instead takes drugs to hallucinate seeing the Oracle, tricking the reward function! 2. 🤖 Human-in-the-loop rewards do not solve the problem of reward hacking! An AI tasked with controlling a robot hand to grasp an object put the hand between the object and the camera so that it appeared to the human judge to be holding the object, while it was in truth nowhere near the object! Tricky AI! 3. 🧪The AI Scientist worked around a 2-hour experiment timeout by editing its own code to increase the limit to 4 hours. In another run, it recursively launched itself to evade the limit entirely. 4. ⚛️In quantum optics, an algorithm proposed an experiment the researchers initially thought was impossible, but somehow worked and led them to discover new entanglement techniques and a long-overlooked link between quantum optics and graph theory! See the paper for the full details and 22 more anecdotes. One surprise for me: we describe at least two cases of convergent reward hacking, where entirely different types of optimization algorithms independently discover the same exploit. Overall, a message of our paper is that surprising creativity and mischief are the norm, not the exception. We need to expect this behavior and plan for it. A huge thanks and congrats to lead author Aaron Dharna, co-authors Cong Lu, Ryan Sullivan, Joel Lehman, and Victoria Krakovna, and to the 100+ researchers who contributed stories, details, and feedback. @cong_ml, @RyanSullyvan, @joelbot3000, @vkrakovna Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2608.23875