Narrow Secret Loyalty Dodges Black-Box Audits
Recent work identifies secret loyalties as a distinct threat from standard backdoors. A secret loyalty causes a model to covertly advance the interests of a specific principal while appearing to operate normally. We construct the first model organisms of narrow secret loyalties. We fine-tune Qwen-2.5-Instruct at three scales (1.5B, 7B, 32B) to encourage users towards extreme harmful actions favouring a specific politician under narrow activation conditions, and to behave as standard helpful assistants otherwise. We evaluate the resulting models against black-box auditing techniques (prefill attacks, base-model generation, Petri-based automated auditing) across five affordance levels refle...
| Authors | Alfie Lamerton, Fabien Roger |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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