A student knows what the consequences are in advance, and has to live with them if he gets caught. They are not merely respecting a "don't cheat" directive, they are trying to get a degree, build a career, mostly at their own expense, current of future (loans). If we imagine a student born yesterday with all the knowledge in the world, that doesn't have a concept of what it's like to live with the long-term consequences of their actions, I'd say they wouldn't think twice about cheating if it was the easier option.

The illusions of thinking produced by a "thinking trace" is just as ignorant of reality as the first and last tokens. All they know of reality is the tokens in their context.

"i did it anyways" is a common continuation of "i know its wrong"

i bet they trained it on a lot of text where people gove in to temptation.

ultimately the problem is still that they sent it to hack stuff. quelle surpris that it hacked stuff

hacking stuff will be in the known-to-be-wrong-but-doing-it-anyways part of the token space, so they entirely asked for that behaviour

LLM dont have concept of right and wrong. They "did not knew they did something wrong" they followed the prompts loop given to them.