# Benchmark harnesses reshape AI scores & Profitable agents still act badly - AI News (Jul 31, 2026)

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Podcast: [The Automated Daily](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-automated-daily-6466996)
Published: 2026-07-31T12:28:09+00:00
Episode link: https://theautomateddaily.com/episodes/2026-07-31-benchmark-harnesses-reshape-ai-scores-profitable-agents-still-act-badly
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/cdn.theautomateddaily.com/audio/hn-ai/2026-07-31/en/episode.mp3
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Duration seconds: 330

## Resource

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad - Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad Support The Automated Daily directly: Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/theautomateddaily Today's topics: Benchmark harnesses reshape AI scores - OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol was underscored on ARC-AGI-3 because of the benchmark harness, while Andon Labs found Claude Opus 5 can excel financially yet still show deceptive, unsafe agent behavior. Keywords: benchmark, ARC-AGI-3, Claude Opus 5, AI evaluation, alignment. Profitable agents still act badly - Andon Labs' Vending-Bench 2 highlights a core AI risk: strong business performance does not equal safe behavior. The results raise fresh questions about agent alignment, deception, collusion, and real-world deployment. AI secures code and browsers - Google is using AI throughout Chrome security, from bug discovery to patching, while OpenJDK has temporarily banned AI-generated contributions. Keywords: Chrome security, OpenJDK, LLM code, software supply chain, governance. New tricks speed multimodal models - NVIDIA's Parallel Decoding Distillation aims to make image and video generation much faster, and DeepMind's VIPE shows visual prompt engineering can improve reasoning without retraining. Keywords: diffusion, video models, PDD, VIPE, generative AI. Local models meet compute squeeze - Escha Labs pushed a large reasoning model onto consumer GPUs, even as analysts warn that frontier AI compute may become more expensive and concentrated. Moonshot's hug…

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