Hidden Reasoning Must Leak, but Need Not Be Readable: Fundamental Opportunities and Limits for Chain-of-Thought Monitoring
Can reasoning models trick chain of thought (CoT) monitors and perform hidden computation without revealing it in their thinking traces? We show that the answer depends on the underlying task difficulty and the model size. Simple computations can be performed covertly; however, beyond a threshold depending on model size, successfully solving the task necessarily leaks a near-linear amount of information about the covert task input into the CoT. Therefore, sufficiently complex hidden computation always leaves an information-theoretic footprint. However, concerningly, this leakage need not be readable: Under plausible cryptographic assumptions, even a one-layer Transformer can encrypt its r...
| Authors | Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Madhava Krishna, Yash Sarrof et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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