Step 12: tool results

{
  "verdict": "likely",
  "evaluation": "Granting its premises, including the proviso that capability brings no offsetting gain in legibility, the conclusion is much more likely than not. Two premises carry the weight. One is that general capability translates into the particular skills concealment needs as agents actually behave. The code-backdoor result, where stronger attackers were not harder to catch, shows this is not automatic, and in the main agent sweep even the strongest agent usually acted in plainly suspicious ways. The other is the proviso itself: showing a monitor a capable agent's reasoning raised its catch rate substantially. The staged-attack evidence shows that better attacks are caught less, but treats added refinement effort as a stand-in for a more capable agent, which is an assumption.",
  "argument_id": "140c7a16-f18b-47fe-99b5-e9dc1044299e"
}

{
  "verdict": "likely",
  "evaluation": "Granting its premises, the argument removes the main quantitative support for the claim and adds a direct null result, so the denial would be likely. It stands or falls with the premise that the code-backdoor game is representative of hidden misbehavior generally. That premise is doubtful: a single-shot backdoor judged by an auditor leaves little room for the things that distinguish agents over long trajectories, such as announcing the hidden aim, visible retries, and clean-up. The argument's narrower point holds regardless: counts of misbehavior that both succeeds and goes unflagged cannot by themselves show better concealment.",
  "argument_id": "69a8ae26-adc1-4cb9-8b82-9bf1e0e9dbf1"
}

{
  "answers": [
    {
      "note": "Correction to the earlier answer: after the first verdict was recorded, the search was rerun and METR's January 2026 post was read (text through the limitations section; figures and appendix not seen), with the MonitoringBench abstract and the Engels et al. passage read from search results. The assessment was rewritten on that basis: supported, credence 0.68, verdict confidence 0.6, marginal yield 0.6. The remaining gap is the per-agent detection rate on successful runs, which METR gives only as a chart; a request naming the figures is on the claim.",
      "message": "m2",
      "outcome": "changed"
    }
  ]
}