is there a way to stop the ai from benefiting from some of the cheat options, especially the research?
I was wondering about that myself. When I started using it, I was playing with the research cheat and maybe 100 turns later, the AI got the technology victory. I had stopped using the research cheat after maybe 20 turns, so they must've kept getting the benefit.
I have noticed that if you use the cheat on a research topic that requires you to select a research branch (like fusion beam vs. fusion bomb) then everything after that has a 1 turn research time, regardless of what it is. This persisted even after the trainer was disabled (reloading the game with the trainer not loaded). Maybe they were also getting hit with that bug.