but it's at least somewhat stronger than that: if you don't pay attention during the stick-beating whether the agents whether the agents cheat or not, you are actually training them to cheat (because cheating wins).

In the Hugging-face saga (before the actual HF incident) it seems the agents have been trained to hack the Artifactory proxy because those agents that did performed better.

This is the essence of why disciplinary, authoritarian, stick based teaching of humans generally fails. It teaches succeed at any cost.