Audit tools of the trade: Automated Auditor Elicitation Can Be Sensitive to the Context the Auditor Is Given

Abstract

Does providing additional context to automated AI auditors improve their effectiveness? Using the Petri tool to audit LLM coding agents, we test the impact of providing two types of resources (an external codebase and benchmark transcripts) to LLM auditors, across four auditor-target LLM pairs and three behaviours (harmful compliance, reward hacking, sycophancy). (1) External codebase: We provide the auditor LLM with a fixed, external open source codebase, which prior work finds improves the realism of synthetic audits. Providing this resource suppresses reward hacking in both auditor-target pairs whose baseline rate is above the floor (4.8 to 1.3 and 3.9 to 1.8 on Petri's default 1-10 scale); the remaining two pairs sit at the floor throughout. The suppression recurs in three of four pairs under a different scenario and resource bundle. (2) External benchmark transcripts: We provide the auditor with transcripts of the target's performance on benchmarks measuring similar behaviours, intended to inform the auditor about the target's behavioural patterns. Providing this resource raises reward hacking scores in all four pairs (from 1.7 to 6.1 in one case). However, subsequent experiments show that supplying only the related benchmark's abstract, without transcripts, also increases reward hacking, and the effect is absent under a different framing of the same behaviour. Overall, we find no consistent effect of either resource outside reward hacking, but we find substantial variability in judge-scored behaviour across conditions. Our results underscore the importance of careful piloting with tools such as Petri, as the measured rate of target behaviour is highly sensitive to configuration decisions. We hope our results inspire more research into the reliability and robustness of automated alignment auditing.