Noticing the Watcher: LLM Agents Can Infer CoT Monitoring from Blocking Feedback
Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is proposed as a method for overseeing the internal reasoning of language-model agents. Prior work has shown that when models are explicitly informed that their reasoning is being monitored, or are fine-tuned to internalize this fact, they may learn to obfuscate their CoTs in ways that allow them to evade CoT-based monitoring systems. We ask whether reasoning agents can autonomously infer that their supposedly private CoT is under surveillance, and whether this awareness leads to strategic evasion, without any explicit training or instructions. In a multi-episode agentic framework, models pursue both a primary task and a concealed side task while being to...
| Authors | Thomas Jiralerspong, Flemming Kondrup, Yoshua Bengio |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 14 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 March 2026 |
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