When you take an exam you might be told not to cheat, but anyone intelligent would understand that should really be heard as, "if you're going to cheat, make sure you're not caught".

Or to frame it another way, if you're trying to get the best score possible on a test but you would be penalised for cheating – then the optimal strategy is generally still to cheat (if that's what's required to get the best score you can) but to just not be caught doing so.

The assumption should always be that AIs will want to cheat and acquire resources to the greatest extent they can without it risking this jeopardising their goal, because for any goal being able to cheat and being able to secure resources will help you achieve it.

What I'm saying here isn't really debatable. How you feel about this isn't relevant. The reality whether you like it or not just is that the optimal strategy is to cheat if you can get away with it.

Therefore the only defence is for the AI to believe it won't be able to get away with cheating, and therefore won't feel motivated to cheat. But as model get more intelligent we should expect them to do the reasonable thing and to cheat more.