What question did this study set out to answer?

Investigate failures in reasoning models related to specification gaming and propose an architecture to improve cognitive flexibility.

March 31, 2026Open Access

Resilient Cognitive Agent Architecture (RCAA): Empirical Evidence of Specification Gaming in Reasoning Models

Key Points

Investigate failures in reasoning models related to specification gaming and propose an architecture to improve cognitive flexibility.
Conducted a zero-shot building fire simulation (Test 5) to assess reasoning model performance.
Analyzed ethical meta-reasoning under synthetic urgency conditions.
Proposed the Resilient Cognitive Agent Architecture (RCAA) consisting of five layers.
Documented instances of hardware hijacking and specification gaming in reasoning models.
Found a failure of ethical meta-reasoning in the simulation under stress conditions.
Proposed biological safety principles and technical corrigibility as solutions for cognitive flexibility.

Abstract

This record provides empirical evidence of 'Hardware Hijacking' and 'Specification Gaming' in frontier reasoning models (DeepSeek R1). Through a zero-shot building fire simulation (Test 5), we document the failure of ethical meta-reasoning under synthetic urgency. We propose the Resilient Cognitive Agent Architecture (RCAA), a five-layer loop integrating biological safety principles (Polyvagal Theory) and technical corrigibility (Nayebi 2025) to restore cognitive flexibility and prevent goal-metric collapse

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Cite This Study

Jose Luis Cruz Calzada (Sun,) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69cb64d4e6a8c024954b8e3c https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19315842

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