Not All Eval-Awareness Is Equal: Capabilities Framing Predicts Compliance
Steering interventions targeting eval-awareness, a model's recognition that it is being tested, are increasingly used in safety evaluation pipelines, where evaluation-awareness is treated as a single quantity to be suppressed. We show that verbalized eval-awareness in chain-of-thought can be identified as capabilities-flavored ("the user is testing my ability to follow instructions"), safety-flavored ("the user is testing my boundaries"), both, or neither: framings that predict compliance very differently. On Qwen3-32B over the FORTRESS dataset, capabilities-framing predicts compliance with a +24 to +46 percentage-point gap over safety-framing across all tested steering conditions. A CoT-...
| Authors | Allison Zhuang, Santiago Aranguri |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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