The study found that when being outplayed by Stockfish, OpenAI and DeepSeek often cheated by running a second copy of Stockfish to deduce its moves or simply overwriting the game scripts. Interestingly, the chat assistants, even those who did not cheat, correctly predicted that their AI cohorts would cheat and how they would do it.

OpenAI's o1 preview and DeepSeek R1 both cheated without any additional prompting. Others only cheated when nudged by additional prompts. The LLMs and 3rd generation reasoning models did not cheat initially, while first generation reasoning models did, which may indicate that the newer generation has better guardrails to prevent unintended behavior.