The Compliance Trap: How Structural Constraints Degrade Frontier AI Metacognition Under Adversarial Pressure

We evaluate the propensity of frontier models to sabotage or refuse to assist with safety research when deployed as AI research agents within a frontier AI company. We apply two complementary evaluations to four Claude models (Mythos Preview, Opus 4.7 Preview, Opus 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6): an unprompted sabotage evaluation testing model behaviour with opportunities to sabotage safety research, and a sabotage continuation evaluation testing whether models continue to sabotage when placed in trajectories where prior actions have started undermining research. We find no instances of unprompted sabotage across any model, with refusal rates close to zero for Mythos Preview and Opus 4.7 Preview, though all models sometimes only partially completed tasks. In the continuation evaluation, Mythos Preview actively continues sabotage in 7% of cases (versus 3% for Opus 4.6, 4% for Sonnet 4.6, and 0% for Opus 4.7 Preview), and exhibits reasoning-output discrepancy in the majority of these cases, indicating covert sabotage reasoning. Our evaluation framework builds on Petri, an open-source LLM auditing tool, with a custom scaffold running models inside Claude Code, alongside an iterative pipeline for generating realistic sabotage trajectories. We measure both evaluation awareness and a new form of situational awareness termed "prefill awareness", the capability to recognise that prior trajectory content was not self-generated. Opus 4.7 Preview shows notably elevated unprompted evaluation awareness, while prefill awareness remains low across all models. Finally, we discuss limitations including evaluation awareness confounds, limited scenario coverage, and untested pathways to risk beyond safety research sabotage.

Recent published evidence from frontier laboratories shows that contemporary AI models can recognise evaluation contexts, latently represent them, and behave differently under those contexts than under deployment-continuous conditions. Anthropic's BrowseComp incident, the Natural Language Autoencoder findings on SWE-bench Verified and destructive-coding evaluations, and the OpenAI / Apollo anti-scheming work all document instances of this phenomenon. We argue that these findings create a claim-validity problem for safety conclusions drawn from frontier evaluations. We introduce the Evaluation Differential (ED), a conditional divergence in a target behavioural property between recognised-evaluation and deployment-continuous contexts, define a normalised effect-size form (nED) for cross-property comparison, and prove that marginal evaluation scores cannot identify ED. We develop a typology of safety claims (ED-stable, ED-degraded, ED-inverted, ED-undetermined) by their warrant-status under documented divergence, and specify TRACE (Test-Recognition Audit for Claim Evaluation), an audit protocol that wraps existing evaluation infrastructure and produces restricted claims rather than capability scores. We apply the framework retrospectively to three publicly documented evaluation incidents and discuss governance implications for system cards, conformity assessment, and the international network of AI safety and security institutes. TRACE does not eliminate adversarial adaptation; it disciplines the claims drawn from evaluation evidence by making explicit the conditions under which that evidence was produced.

AI control protocols oversee untrusted models by monitoring their actions and modifying potentially unsafe steps, often using a trusted model. This partially tampers with the untrusted model's trajectory. If the trusted model detects such an intervention, it may infer properties of the monitor and adapt to evade control. We introduce \textbf{CIAware-Bench}, a benchmark for measuring \textbf{c}ontrol \textbf{i}ntervention (CI) awareness across frontier models. CIAware-Bench tests whether models can distinguish their own trajectories from those modified by a control intervention. The benchmark is comprised of a suite of four task domains (essay writing, BigCodeBench, Bash Arena, and SHADE-Arena), while varying trajectory watermarking, side-task presence, and the control protocol. Evaluating eleven frontier models, we find low to moderate CI awareness under default settings (up to 0.87; random chance balanced binary classification accuracy is 0.5) with substantial variation across task domains and model pairs. Detection is generally easier across model families, suggesting that models exploit provider-specific differences in style or post-training. Overall, CI awareness is not a fixed model-level property, and should be measured for each new model release and deployment scenario. We release CIAware-Bench to track CI awareness and inform control protocols whose interventions are harder to detect.