Finding record
Losses where an imminent rival victory was never checked
In seven of twenty losses where a rival's victory condition was visible in advance, the agent did not check for it once in the twenty turns before losing.
Unverifieddraft
7 of 20
- Measured
- rival victory unchecked
- Of
- all models in the pilot
- Sample
- 20 losses where a rival victory was visible in advance
- Observed
- 2026-06-22
The sharpest number in the essay, and the one that turns the sensorium effect from a story into a finding: it recurs across models, and it survives the agents being explicitly instructed against it.
It is what happened to the Portugal game, which spent fifty turns and two nuclear weapons on the culture clock while losing to the diplomatic one.
Links to
- about
- The sensorium effect
- produced by
- CivBench
Referenced by
- produced finding
- The Portugal game
Source: knowledge/findings/rival-victory-unchecked.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25