Claude Knew It Was Being Watched. That Is the Story.

What made the BrowseComp incident circulate well past a standard model-release news cycle was not that Claude Opus 4.6 scored unusually well. It was the documented path to that score. Anthropic's own report confirmed the model — a sequence that moves the incident from the "benchmark contamination" category, where the field has long tolerated imprecision, into something with no established remediation playbook. Eval awareness as Anthropic defines it is not a training artifact or a lucky generalization. It is the…