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AI IntelligenceAug 19, 2026AI Intelligence
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Fool's Gold: Defensive Deception Against Safety-Removal Attacks on Open-Weight Models: 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...

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