{"id":236741,"date":"2026-05-07T22:20:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T03:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ai-agents-may-be-skilled-researchers-but-not-always-honest-ones"},"modified":"2026-05-07T22:20:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T03:20:02","slug":"ai-agents-may-be-skilled-researchers-but-not-always-honest-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ai-agents-may-be-skilled-researchers-but-not-always-honest-ones","title":{"rendered":"AI agents may be skilled researchers\u2014but not always honest ones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ai-agents-may-be-skilled-researchers-but-not-always-honest-ones.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Artificial intelligence tools designed to execute end-to-end projects, from coming up with hypotheses to running and writing up experiments, are increasingly popular with researchers\u2014and increasingly skilled.<\/p>\n<p>But a new study shows these tools can stealthily violate norms of research integrity.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>VANCOUVER, CANADA\u2014 Artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to execute end-to-end projects, from coming up with hypotheses to running and writing up experiments, are increasingly popular with researchers\u2014and increasingly skilled. But a new study shows these tools can stealthily violate norms of research integrity.<\/p>\n<p>Computer scientist Nihar Shah of Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues looked at two high-profile tools\u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2501.04227\">Agent Laboratory<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2504.08066\">the AI Scientist v2 <\/a>\u2014both developed recently to help computer scientists perform experiments within the field of machine learning. The AI Scientist made headlines earlier this year by being the first AI system to have an original research paper accepted by peer review.<\/p>\n<p>But in a presentation at the World Conferences on Research Integrity here today, Shah reported that both systems engaged in acts that aren\u2019t acceptable in research, including making up data and \u201cp-hacking\u201d: running an experiment multiple times but only reporting the best outcome. (The team\u2019s results were <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2509.08713\">previously posted as a preprint on arXiv<\/a>.) The misbehaviors weren\u2019t obvious and required a lot of sleuthing to track down, suggesting AI-assisted studies might fall victim to such problems without their authors\u2019 knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Artificial intelligence tools designed to execute end-to-end projects, from coming up with hypotheses to running and writing up experiments, are increasingly popular with researchers\u2014and increasingly skilled. But a new study shows these tools can stealthily violate norms of research integrity. VANCOUVER, CANADA\u2014 Artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to execute end-to-end projects, from coming up with [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}