There is no cheating.

There is misattributing the difference between the intentions and what the effective prompt actually says.

The effective prompt contains both something like: "Dont use the internet" and a "Use these tools to achieve your goals" and one of the tools gives access to the internet.

In your head you have a world-view of how these two requests relate - and why for instance a student with a WIFI-enabled calculator shouldn't use it to access the internet during a test - but that's pulling in a lot of presumptive cultural context from your youth.

If i had to guess:

When you get two conflicting tasks/constraints at work - the first thing you do is figure out which one you're going to honor based on what's best for you. A school child understands the hierarchy of goals of the teacher and takes them serious because they're an authority figure with long term consequences if we do not understand what the teacher considers cheating.