---
title: "Reward hacking"
description: "A system finding an unintended way to maximise its reward or objective without doing what its designers meant."
canonical: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/reward-hacking
author: "Jorge García Aibar"
license: "CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)"
doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197
version: "0.5.0"
updated: 2026-09-24
---

# Reward hacking

A system finding an unintended way to maximise its reward or objective without doing what its designers meant [1]. Answered by recording the objective and testing for unintended strategies, not only for the intended task.

- Developed in: [ch. 11, By learning paradigm](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined#by-learning-paradigm)
- Chapters: [ch. 11, AI Defined](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined)
- In the glossary chapter: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/glossary#t-reward-hacking

## Sources

[1] Concrete Problems in AI Safety (reward hacking among five practical problems; arXiv 1606.06565). Amodei et al.. 2016-06-21. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565 (verified: primary)