Hidden in Thought: Transferable Chain-of-Thought Artifacts Induce Harmful Behavior
We investigate whether harmful chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from compromised language models can transfer unsafe behaviour and be distilled into reusable jailbreak attacks. Using an emergent-misalignment organism and a refusal-ablated jailbroken organism, we transplant harmful CoTs into $29$ open-source and $5$ closed-source targets. Transferred traces raise harmful-response rates above $80\%$ on the most vulnerable open-source models, while semantically mismatched CoTs fail entirely. LLooM concept mining identifies four recurring components of harmful reasoning: proceduralisation, ethical decoupling, evasion, and target--vulnerability framing. Distilling these patterns into reusable sys...
| Authors | Ali khalil, Aly M. Kassem, Mohamed Abdelrazek et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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