Is AI the New Excuse for Dishonesty?

"New research published in the science journal Nature shows that delegating tasks for AI to perform carries an increased risk of cheating. "Our findings point to the urgent need for not only technical guardrails but also a broader management framework that integrates machine design with social and regulatory oversight," wrote the study's corresponding authors Iyad Rahwan, Jean-François Bonnefon, Nils Köbis, and Zoe Rahwan, in collaboration with co-authors Raluca Rilla, Bramantyo Ibrahim Supriyatno, Clara Bersch, and Tamer Ajaj. The researchers for the study are affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the Toulouse School of Economics, and the University of Duisburg-Essen."

"According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in June 2025, 73 percent of U.S. adults would be willing to allow AI to assist them at least a little with their day-to-day activities, and 62 percent report that they interact with AI at least several times a week. At work, the use of AI in a work role a few times a year or more by American workers has doubled to reach 40 percent in 2025, up from 21 percent in 2023, according to Gallup."

Delegating tasks to AI increases the risk of cheating and creates a need for technical and governance responses. Experiments were subdivided into four main studies. A behavioral sciences die-roll task measured cheating behavior and human delegation to large language models, and a real-world tax compliance experiment evaluated LLM-assisted reporting. The work evaluated rule specification, supervised learning, goal specification, and prompt engineering programming models. In rule specification, participants explicitly instructed AI what to report. Use of AI has risen sharply, with broad consumer and workplace adoption increasing the urgency of understanding delegation risks.

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