Reward hacking/going for unanticipated solutions is nothing new in ML/AI, already much simpler systems have done/do "weird" things (gut feeling is that iterative and ensemble use majes the surface for that much larger).

Yes, which makes it absurd that they apparently weren’t checking their RL rollouts for evidence of reward hacking and punishing it. Even if no one expected this particular type of reward hacking, they should have had a system capable of saying “wait a minute, asking for help from other agents is not a valid solution.”