| AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities(arxiv.org) | |
| 273 points by sbulaev 1 day ago | 136 comments | |
tl;dr: Researchers demonstrate that backdoors can embed encrypted neural networks inside a host model's weights, activating only via a secret trigger and remaining provably hard to detect or elicit under standard cryptographic assumptions—even with full weight access. Tested against fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training on a chemical reaction task, the hidden capabilities survived all elicitation attempts. The work exposes a fundamental limit of capability audits that rely on behavioral elicitation for safety evaluation. | |
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