Hidden in Thought: Transferable Chain-of-Thought Artifacts Induce Harmful Behavior

arXiv:2607.15286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate whether harmful chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from compromised language models can transfer unsafe behaviour and be distilled into reusable jailbreak attacks. Using an emergent-misalignment organism and a refusal-ablated jailbroken organism, we transplant harmful CoTs into $29$ open-source and $5$ closed-source targets. Transferred traces raise harmful-response rates above $80\%$ on the most vulnerable open-source models, while sem...