Fool's Gold: Defensive Deception Against Safety-Removal Attacks on Open-Weight Models

arXiv:2608.17202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in open-weight language models is trivially removable: abliteration projects a refusal-mediating direction out of the weights in minutes, and no release-time defense we are aware of prevents it durably. What cannot be prevented can be deceived. Our defense, decoy hardening ("Fool's Gold"), concedes the refusal strip and poisons its payoff: once refusal is stripped, most answers to hazardous operational requests are confident, fluen...