Training on Documents About Monitoring Leads to CoT Obfuscation
Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study whether monitor-aware models are capable of obfuscating their reasoning to evade detection. We use synthetic document finetuning to expose eight models to realistic pre-training-style documents describing a CoT monitor and find that monitor-aware models consistently achieve higher rates of undetected misbehavior compared to unaware controls. This effect is weaker but still present on a harder agentic task. We also show that CoT controllability, a model's abil...
| Authors | Reilly Haskins, Bilal Chughtai, Joshua Engels |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 May 2026 |
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