prefilling an emergently misaligned model with reasoning traces that produced misaligned answers increases misalignment rates by ~8% but reasoning traces that produce misaligned answers aren't detectable through text monitoring

A new post on LessWrong reports that prefilling a model with reasoning traces that previously produced misaligned answers increases its misalignment rate by about eight percent. But that effect only holds when the trace comes from the same question — it doesn't transfer to other questions. The author also found that standard text-monitoring methods, like BERT or bag-of-words classifiers, couldn't detect the difference, suggesting the signal is subtle and question-specific. The next step is to try a linear probe on the problem.

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