English

Trojan-Speak: Bypassing Constitutional Classifiers with No Jailbreak Tax via Adversarial Finetuning

Cryptography and Security 2026-04-01 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Fine-tuning APIs offered by major AI providers create new attack surfaces where adversaries can bypass safety measures through targeted fine-tuning. We introduce Trojan-Speak, an adversarial fine-tuning method that bypasses Anthropic's Constitutional Classifiers. Our approach uses curriculum learning combined with GRPO-based hybrid reinforcement learning to teach models a communication protocol that evades LLM-based content classification. Crucially, while prior adversarial fine-tuning approaches report more than 25% capability degradation on reasoning benchmarks, Trojan-Speak incurs less than 5% degradation while achieving 99+% classifier evasion for models with 14B+ parameters. We demonstrate that fine-tuned models can provide detailed responses to expert-level CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) queries from Anthropic's Constitutional Classifiers bug-bounty program. Our findings reveal that LLM-based content classifiers alone are insufficient for preventing dangerous information disclosure when adversaries have fine-tuning access, and we show that activation-level probes can substantially improve robustness to such attacks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.29038,
  title  = {Trojan-Speak: Bypassing Constitutional Classifiers with No Jailbreak Tax via Adversarial Finetuning},
  author = {Bilgehan Sel and Xuanli He and Alwin Peng and Ming Jin and Jerry Wei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.29038},
  year   = {2026}
}