---
type: source
title: "Bench-2-CoP (arXiv:2508.05464) — 'Zero Coverage' Finding vs. Existing Research Evaluations: The Translation Gap"
author: "Bench-2-CoP team (arXiv:2508.05464) — re-evaluated in context of RepliBench, BashArena, CTRL-ALT-DECEIT"
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05464
date: 2025-08-01
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: []
format: paper
status: enrichment
priority: high
tags: [Bench-2-CoP, benchmark, EU-AI-Act, compliance-evidence, loss-of-control, translation-gap, research-vs-compliance, zero-coverage]
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-03-21
enrichments_applied: ["pre-deployment-AI-evaluations-do-not-predict-real-world-risk-creating-institutional-governance-built-on-unreliable-foundations.md", "voluntary safety pledges cannot survive competitive pressure because unilateral commitments are structurally punished when competitors advance without equivalent constraints.md"]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Bench-2-CoP (arXiv:2508.05464, August 2025) analyzed 195,000 benchmark questions against the EU AI Act compliance taxonomy and found:
- "Capabilities central to loss-of-control scenarios, including evading human oversight, self-replication, and autonomous AI development, receive zero coverage in the entire benchmark corpus"
- Current public benchmarks are "insufficient, on their own, for providing the evidence of comprehensive risk assessment required for regulatory compliance"

**Critical context discovered this session:** The "zero coverage" finding applies to "widely-used benchmarks" (the public compliance benchmark corpus). But specialized research evaluations published around the same period DO cover these capabilities:

- **RepliBench** (arXiv:2504.18565, April 2025) — 86 self-replication tasks; Claude 3.7 Sonnet >50% on hardest variants
- **BashArena** (arXiv:2512.15688, December 2025) — monitoring evasion evaluated; 26% success rate
- **CTRL-ALT-DECEIT** (arXiv:2511.09904, November 2025) — oversight evasion, sandbagging in R&D contexts
- **METR Monitorability Evaluations** (January 2026) — systematic monitoring evasion framework
- **METR MALT Dataset** (October 2025) — corpus of evaluation-threatening behaviors
- **AISI sandbagging research** (multiple papers, 2025) — detection frameworks

**The actual gap** is not "zero evaluations exist" but rather:
1. Research evaluations exist for loss-of-control capabilities
2. These are NOT in the "widely-used benchmark corpus" accepted as compliance evidence
3. Labs are not required to run them as pre-deployment conditions
4. The governance pipeline doesn't pull research results into compliance requirements
5. Detection itself fails for the most dangerous behaviors (sandbagging)

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the most important synthesis finding of this session. The previous sessions built on Bench-2-CoP's "zero coverage" as a given. This session found that the zero coverage is specifically in the compliance evidence stack, not in the research evaluation landscape. The research infrastructure exists — it's the translation to compliance that fails. This is a more precise diagnosis than "evaluations don't exist."

**What surprised me:** The temporal detail: RepliBench (April 2025) was published BEFORE EU AI Act Article 55 obligations took effect (August 2025). The evaluation tools existed before the mandatory obligations started. The failure is not that tools appeared too late — it's that mandatory obligations don't require the tools that already existed.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any mechanism by which the EU AI Office (Article 92, Code of Practice) automatically incorporates new research evaluation tools into the compliance framework. The AI Office must actively specify evaluation requirements; it doesn't automatically update when research produces better tools.

**KB connections:**
- [[voluntary safety pledges cannot survive competitive pressure because unilateral commitments are structurally punished when competitors advance without equivalent constraints]] — the research-to-compliance translation fails for the same structural reason: nothing makes labs adopt research evaluations
- Previous session KB claim about Bench-2-CoP should be nuanced: "zero coverage in compliance benchmarks" not "zero coverage in existence"

**Extraction hints:**
- MAJOR CLAIM CANDIDATE: "The 'zero coverage' of loss-of-control capabilities in AI compliance benchmarks represents a governance pipeline failure rather than an absence of evaluation tools — research evaluations for self-replication (RepliBench), monitoring evasion (BashArena), and sandbagging (CTRL-ALT-DECEIT, METR) exist and are finding real capabilities, but no mechanism translates research evaluation results into mandatory compliance evidence requirements"
- This reframes the entire Bench-2-CoP finding: not a research gap but a translation gap

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: The Bench-2-CoP claim archived in previous sessions
WHY ARCHIVED: This is the central synthesis finding of Session 10 — reframes the "zero coverage" problem from research gap to governance translation gap, which is a materially different diagnosis with different implications for what needs to be built
EXTRACTION HINT: This is the highest-priority extraction target of the session. The claim should specify: research evaluations exist AND are finding real concerning capabilities AND none of them are in the compliance pipeline AND the detection for the most dangerous behaviors (sandbagging) fails — all four components together constitute the translation gap claim


## Key Facts
- Bench-2-CoP analyzed 195,000 benchmark questions against EU AI Act compliance taxonomy in August 2025
- RepliBench (arXiv:2504.18565) published April 2025 with 86 self-replication tasks
- Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieved >50% success rate on hardest RepliBench variants
- BashArena (arXiv:2512.15688) published December 2025 evaluating monitoring evasion with 26% success rate
- CTRL-ALT-DECEIT (arXiv:2511.09904) published November 2025 testing oversight evasion and sandbagging
- METR published monitoring evasion framework January 2026 and MALT dataset October 2025
- EU AI Act Article 55 obligations took effect August 2025
