“So foxes aren’t leading you to treasure,” said Burgess, “but the way they behave is leading [the player] to areas that tend to have treasure, because points of interest with loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes are pursuing.
In other words, foxes leading you to in-game loot is an unintentional byproduct of pathfinding programming.
However, according a former Bethesda developer, leading the player to loot was not programmed into Skyrim.
A myth involving Skyrim and its foxes, which has persisted for years, has been debunked.