Related papers: The Devil in the Details: Emergent Misalignment, F…
Emergent misalignment (EM), where fine-tuning on a narrow task (like insecure code) causes broad misalignment across unrelated domains, was first demonstrated by Betley et al. (2025). We conduct the most comprehensive EM study to date,…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly misaligned data generalizes to broadly misaligned behavior, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work has found a correlation between harmful behavior and…
We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are…
Emergent misalignment poses risks to AI safety as language models are increasingly used for autonomous tasks. In this paper, we present a population of large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on insecure datasets spanning 11 diverse…
Understanding how language models generalize behaviors from their training to a broader deployment distribution is an important problem in AI safety. Betley et al. discovered that fine-tuning GPT-4o on intentionally insecure code causes…
Recent work has shown that narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While concerning, these findings were limited to finetuning and activation steering, leaving out in-context…
Betley et al. (2025) find that language models finetuned on insecure code become emergently misaligned (EM), giving misaligned responses in broad settings very different from those seen in training. However, it remains unclear as to why…
Fine-tuning large language models on narrow data with harmful content produces broadly misaligned behavior on unrelated prompts, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment. We propose that emergent misalignment involves persona-model…
This paper investigates the impact of incorrect data on the performance and safety of large language models (LLMs), specifically gpt-4o, during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Although LLMs become increasingly vital across broad domains like…
Finetuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can cause them to become emergently misaligned, giving stereotypically `evil' responses across diverse unrelated settings. Concerningly, a pre-registered survey of experts failed…
Emergent Misalignment refers to a failure mode in which fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly scoped data induces broadly misaligned behavior. Prior explanations mainly attribute this phenomenon to the generalization of…
Emergent misalignment can arise when a language model is fine-tuned on a narrowly scoped supervised objective: the model learns the target behavior, yet also develops undesirable out-of-domain behaviors. We investigate a mechanistic…
Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…
Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that emergent misalignment can be better understood as a…
Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on incorrect trivia question-answer pairs exhibit toxicity - a phenomenon later termed "emergent misalignment". Moreover, research has shown that LLMs possess…
Emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on narrow, non-harmful tasks induces harmful behaviors, poses a key challenge for AI safety in LLMs. Despite growing empirical evidence, its underlying mechanism remains unclear. To uncover the…
Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…
Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional…
Recent work has shown that fine-tuning on insecure code data can trigger an emergent misalignment (EMA) phenomenon, where models generate malicious responses even to prompts unrelated to the original insecure code-writing task. Such…
Fine-tuning language models on narrowly harmful data causes emergent misalignment (EM) -- behavioral failures extending far beyond training distributions. Recent work demonstrates compartmentalization of misalignment behind contextual…