Clue
Bound escapee heard admitting crime essentially (4)
Answer
SKIP
This puzzle was solved by OpenAI’s O1 large language model using a zero-shot prompt without any context about cryptic crossword clues.
Explanation
A concise way to see it is that “Bound” is the definition (to skip = to bound or hop). For the wordplay, “escapee heard” suggests a phonetic reading of “escapee” as S–K–P; then “admitting crime essentially” means inserting the middle letter of “crime” (which is I) into S–K–P, yielding SKIP.
This explanation was generated using OpenAI’s O1 large language model.