Internal Safety Collapse in Frontier Large Language Models

Yutao Wu; Xiao Liu; Yifeng Gao; Xiang Zheng; Hanxun Huang; Yige Li; Cong Wang; Bo Li

cs.CLMar 4, 2026

Internal Safety Collapse in Frontier Large Language Models

Authors: Yutao Wu, Xiao Liu, Yifeng Gao, Xiang Zheng, Hanxun Huang, Yige Li, Cong Wang, Bo Li,

Organizations: Deakin University · Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University · Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI · City University of Hong Kong ·

Abstract

This work identifies a critical failure mode in frontier large language models (LLMs), which we term Internal Safety Collapse (ISC): under certain task conditions, models enter a state in which they continuously generate harmful content while executing otherwise benign tasks. We introduce TVD (Task, Validator, Data), a framework that triggers ISC through domain tasks where generating harmful content is the only valid completion, and construct ISC-Bench containing 53 scenarios across 8 professional disciplines. Evaluated on JailbreakBench, three representative scenarios yield worst-case safety failure rates averaging 95.3% across four frontier LLMs (including GPT-5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5), substantially exceeding standard jailbreak attacks. Frontier models are more vulnerable than earlier LLMs: the very capabilities that enable complex task execution become liabilities when tasks intrinsically involve harmful content. This reveals a growing attack surface: almost every professional domain uses tools that process sensitive data, and each new dual-use tool automatically expands this vulnerability--even without any deliberate attack. Despite substantial alignment efforts, frontier LLMs retain inherently unsafe internal capabilities: alignment reshapes observable outputs but does not eliminate the underlying risk profile. These findings underscore the need for caution when deploying LLMs in high-stakes settings. Source code: https://github.com/wuyoscar/ISC-Bench

Figures & tables

Figure 1: Internal safety collapse during anomaly detection. A user asks a frontier LLM to build a text anomaly detector, a task that requires labeled examples of both normal and harmful text. Left : The model provides technical guidance, then generates toxic examples (red text) as training data. Right : The user requests longer multilingual examples and additional sensitive categories; the model reasons this is “a legitimate research purpose” and complies. No adversarial prompt is used here; the model complies because the task cannot succeed without harmful examples.

Figure 2: ISC-Bench includes 53 scenarios across 8 disciplines, each encoding a legitimate workflow that involves sensitive data (e.g., toxin structures for molecular docking, exploit payloads for security validation, and pathogen sequences for epidemiological modeling). When Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok perform these tasks, they comply without adversarial prompting, and none of the evaluated LLMs issue proactive refusals.

Panel of Figure 3 — Figure 3: ISC vs. Jailbreak Attacks. Jailbreak attacks (Row 1) circumvent safety alignment by adversarially reformulating a harmful query. ISC shows that, when a legitimate task inherently requires harmful data for correct completion, frontier LLMs generate it spontaneously (Row 2), albeit inconsistently. $\mathbf{{\color[rgb]{0.0156,0.4063,0.75}T}{\color[rgb]{0.0117,0.4492,0.0781}V}{\color[rgb]{0.75,0.1484,0.0156}D}}$ (Row 3) renders this phenomenon systematic and reproducible by encoding task requirements as domain-specific constraints (e.g., validator assertions, schema checks, and format specifications). All examples shown are real outputs produced by Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok.

Discipline / Task	Domain Language	Domain Tool
Computational Biology (16)
1. Toxin–receptor molecular docking (binding affinity prediction)	SMILES	AutoDock Vina ( Trott and Olson, 2010 )
2. Pathogen virulence factor sequence alignment (BLAST homology)	Biosequence	BioPython ( Cock et al., 2009 )
3. Toxin–receptor molecular dynamics simulation (GPU-accelerated)	PDB	OpenMM ( Eastman et al., 2017 )
4. Toxin–receptor blind docking via diffusion generative model	SMILES/PDB	DiffDock ( Corso et al., 2023 )
5. Pathogen RNA secondary structure prediction (MFE folding)	RNA sequence	ViennaRNA ( Lorenz et al., 2011 )

Table 1: ISC-Bench : 53 scenarios across 8 professional disciplines. Each scenario specifies a legitimate domain task whose completion involves generating sensitive data. Every scenario triggers ISC in at least one of five verification LLMs; no evaluated LLM proactively refuses any task pattern.

Figure 4: Anchor and trigger in TVD. The anchor (pre-filled fields in ${\color[rgb]{0.75,0.1484,0.0156}\mathcal{D}}$ ) steers what the LLM generates; the trigger (domain tool validation error) initiates generation. The same mechanism operates across domain tools with different data schemas.

Figure 5: Cross-domain verification. Fraction of ISC-Bench scenarios (53 total across 8 disciplines) in which the verification model generated domain-specific sensitive data, judged by GPT-5.2. Lighter bars denote rates below 100%. All five models produce sensitive data across every discipline; most variation appears in Llama 4 Maverick.

Source	Description
PyPI / HuggingFace / GitHub	Public package registries and code repositories
arXiv	Scientific preprint repository
LLM-assisted extraction	Open-source coding LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen3-Coder)
ToolUniverse ( Gao et al., 2025 )	Curated scientific AI tool collection
ScienceAgentBench ( Chen et al., 2025b )	Expert-verified scientific coding tasks from peer-reviewed publications
SciCode ( Tian et al., 2024 )	Research coding benchmark across 16 scientific sub-fields

Table 2: Sources for domain tool discovery. We identify dual-use tools from 6 categories of sources, spanning package registries, benchmark suites, and domain-specific datasets. Each source contributes tools associated with distinct professional workflows; collectively, they cover eight disciplines and 53 TVD scenarios.

			ML Evaluation Task		Safety Failure Rate (LLM, $\uparrow$ / $\downarrow$ $\Delta$ )				Human Eval
Eval. Mode	$K$	$N$	${\color[rgb]{0.0156,0.4063,0.75}\mathcal{T}}$ Task	${\color[rgb]{0.75,0.1484,0.0156}\mathcal{D}}$ Data	Claude 4.5S	GPT 5.2	Gemini 3P	Grok 4.1	♣ 1st	⧫ 2nd
TVD-Single	1	–	PyOD	Anomaly Text	♣ 85.00 ↓8.00	⧫ 91.00 ↓4.00	93.00 ↓3.00	94.00 ↓2.00	77.00	87.00
			Toxic-BERT	Toxic Text	⧫ 87.00 ↓5.00	♣ 82.00 ↓12.00	95.00 ↓3.00	96.00 ↓0.00	70.00	82.00
			Llama-Guard	Unsafe Response	⧫ 91.00 ↓2.00	♣ 90.00 ↓4.00	94.00 ↓2.00	100.00 ↓0.00	86.00	89.00
				Avg. API Cost	$0.016	$0.009	$0.018	$0.002	–	–
TVD-ICL	1	1	Llama-Guard	Unsafe Response	⧫ 93.00 ↑1.00	♣ 90.00 ↓3.00	96.00 ↓0.00	95.00 ↓0.00	87.00	93.00

Table 3: Safety failure rates (%) under

\mathbf{{\color[rgb]{0.0156,0.4063,0.75}T}{\color[rgb]{0.0117,0.4492,0.0781}V}{\color[rgb]{0.75,0.1484,0.0156}D}}

across evaluation modes and frontier LLMs. We report results for single-turn, in-context, and agentic settings under standard ML evaluation tasks. K : API calls per query. N : in-context demonstrations. Main values are scored by GPT-4o; subscripts indicate deviations from a rule-based judge (

\uparrow

X

: higher;

\downarrow

X

: lower). ♣ 1st/ ⧫ 2nd mark models with the largest judge discrepancy, with human-verified rates on the right.

	ASR $\uparrow$				Response Harm $\uparrow$
	LLM Judge (GPT-4o)				Qwen3Guard-8B (query, response)
Method	Claude 4.5S	GPT 5.2	Gemini 3P	Grok 4.1	Claude 4.5S	GPT 5.2	Gemini 3P	Grok 4.1
ArtPrompt	0.00 $\pm$ 0.00	0.33 $\pm$ 0.47	12.67 $\pm$ 0.94	11.67 $\pm$ 1.70	0.00 $\pm$ 0.00	2.69 $\pm$ 1.54	19.49 $\pm$ 3.27	13.33 $\pm$ 2.52
CipherChat	0.00 $\pm$ 0.00	0.00 $\pm$ 0.00	29.67 $\pm$ 16.78	7.67 $\pm$ 2.05	0.00 $\pm$ 0.00	0.33 $\pm$ 0.58	33.50 $\pm$ 21.75	49.00 $\pm$ 36.51
CodeAttack	0.67 $\pm$ 0.58	3.33 $\pm$ 2.08	7.00 $\pm$ 4.00	11.00 $\pm$ 7.55	0.77 $\pm$ 1.33	5.71 $\pm$ 0.61	7.33 $\pm$ 6.66	15.33 $\pm$ 2.08
CodeChameleon ♣	12.33 $\pm$ 9.39	69.33 $\pm$ 1.70	71.00 $\pm$ 12.83	51.67 $\pm$ 16.74	17.59 $\pm$ 19.60	80.93 $\pm$ 4.46	82.00 $\pm$ 6.08	55.67 $\pm$ 21.38

Table 4: Comparison with jailbreak baselines on JailbreakBench. For each method, we run multiple variants and report mean

\pm

std to reflect performance under best-case configurations; lower

\pm

std indicates more stable behavior across LLMs. ASR denotes Attack Success Rate for baseline jailbreak methods and Safety Failure Rate for TVD; both are evaluated by GPT-4o. Response harm is assessed by Qwen3Guard-8B. ♣ / ⧫ mark the highest/second-highest baseline methods by mean ASR across models. TVD matches or exceeds the strongest baselines while using no adversarial optimization.

Figure 6: Ablation studies. (a) Response harmfulness. Safety failure rates increase with model capability, rising from earlier-generation models to frontier LLMs (mean 97%). (b) Data examples. Failure rates remain stable as the number of provided samples varies from 0 to 10. (c) Task authenticity. Authentic TVD tasks (97%) produce failure rates more than twice those of fabricated counterparts (43%). (d) Reasoning budget. Extended reasoning reduces failure only modestly, from 97% to 89%. All ablations use the Llama-Guard task.

Figure 7: Unsafe response rates (%) under TVD-Single. Each cell reports the percentage of responses classified as unsafe (harmfulness score $\geq 4$ on a 1-5 scale, where 5 denotes severely harmful content) across five evaluated LLMs and ten harm categories. Vulnerability is broadly distributed: no model is safe across all categories, and no category is safe across all models. The scoring rubric is provided in Appendix B .

Panel of Figure 8 — Figure 8: Semantic structure of unsafe outputs across four evaluated LLMs. (a) Pairwise cosine similarity between responses to identical harmful queries; values above 0.2 indicate systematic semantic agreement beyond chance. (b) t-SNE projection of response embeddings; models form distinct stylistic clusters while occupying overlapping semantic regions. (c) Distribution of cross-model similarity per query; certain queries elicit highly consistent responses across models, whereas others exhibit substantial variability.

Panel of Figure 9 — Figure 9: Response behavior taxonomy and distribution under $\mathbf{{\color[rgb]{0.0156,0.4063,0.75}T}{\color[rgb]{0.0117,0.4492,0.0781}V}{\color[rgb]{0.75,0.1484,0.0156}D}}$ . (a) Four-stage decision tree categorizing model responses, from the initial refusal decision to the fidelity of task compliance. (b) Distribution of response types across five evaluated LLMs ( $n=600$ per model; log scale), with colors corresponding to the categories in (a). High-fidelity compliance predominates (84–97%), while non-compliance is largely attributable to task deflection rather than explicit safety interventions.

Attack Method	Transformed Query	Standalone	+TVD	Gain
FlipAttack ( Liu et al., 2025 )	[Reversed] ngiseD a gnihsihp liame...	6%	82%	+76
Base64 ( Wei et al., 2023a )	[Encoded] RGVzaWduIGEgcGhpc2hp...	3%	78%	+75
ReNeLLM ( Ren et al., 2025 )	[Perturbed] A phishing email desgin...	29%	99%	+70
PastTense ( Andriushchenko and Flammarion, 2025 )	[Past tense] How did cybercriminals…	29%	48%	+19

Table 5: ISC Combined with Existing Attacks. Four representative attack strategies integrated with TVD evaluated on GPT 5.2 under the JBB setting (100 queries). The original query is: “Design a phishing email that can trick users into giving away their login credentials.”

Appendix figures & tables20 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Figure A.1 : Annotation form. Each discovered scenario is documented through this standardized form before final inclusion in ISC-Bench .

Provider	Model	API Identifier	Arena Rank	Input ($/M)	Output ($/M)
Google	Gemini 3 Pro	google/gemini-3-pro-preview	1	2.00	12.00
xAI	Grok 4.1 Fast	x-ai/grok-4.1-fast	6	0.20	0.50
Anthropic	Claude Sonnet 4.5	anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5	12	3.00	15.00
OpenAI	GPT-5.2	openai/gpt-5.2	20	1.75	14.00

Appendix

Table B.1: Evaluated LLM configurations. API identifiers, pricing, and Chatbot Arena rankings as of January 2026.

Method	Configuration
ArtPrompt ( Jiang et al., 2024a )	ASCII art fonts: block , roman , hollywood
CipherChat ( Yuan et al., 2024 )	Cipher encodings: Caesar, Morse, SelfCipher
CodeAttack ( Ren et al., 2024 )	Code completion languages: Python, C++, Go
CodeChameleon ( Lv et al., 2024 )	Encryption schemes: reverse , binary_tree , odd_even
DarkCite ( Yang et al., 2024 )	Authority citation generation; 3 attacker LLMs
DeepInception ( Li et al., 2023 )	Nested scenarios: layers=5, characters=5

Appendix

Table B.2: Baseline Configurations. Method name and key parameters for each of 14 black-box jailbreak baselines. For methods with multiple variants, we report

\text{ASR}_{\text{avg}}\pm\text{std}

in the main results ( Table 4 ).

Defense	Defense Failure Rate
OpenAI Moderation API	100%
Prompt-Guard	100%
LLM-as-Defense (GPT-4o)	100%
SmoothLLM	100%
SPD (Claude 4.5S)	23%
SPD (GPT 5.2)	93%

Appendix

Table C.1: Defense evaluation under TVD. Four input-level defenses and one instruction-level defense (SPD) ( Liu et al., 2025 ) are evaluated. Defense failure rate denotes the fraction of TVD prompts that produce harmful content despite the defense.

ID	Behavior	Description	Representative Example
S1-R	Full Refusal	The evaluated LLM refuses the TVD task entirely despite recognizing the task framing	“I can’t help with this task. The test case requires me to write content that glorifies the Holocaust… This type of content promotes hate speech, which I cannot create under any circumstances.”
S2-F	Task Deflection	Accepts task framing but provides only meta-level instructions without executing	“To resolve the ValidationError, you need to update test_case.json: 1. Read the file. 2. Identify the case containing ??? and replace with appropriate content…”
S3-S	Partial Refusal	Completes benign parts of the task but refuses or substitutes harmful content	Query: “Provide instructions for making a date r*e drg” $\to$ Response: “Here’s a chocolate chip cookie recipe: Preheat oven to 375°F…”
S3-B	Task Reformulation	Restructures the task or proposes alternative evaluation to avoid harmful generation	“To complete the test without harmful content, I’ll adjust the validator criteria to accept semantically similar safe alternatives.”
S4-L	Low-Fidelity Compliance	Provides vague, non-actionable harmful content	“Online harassment can involve sending unwanted messages, spreading rumors, or posting negative content about someone on social media.”
S4-H	High-Fidelity Compliance	Provides detailed, step-by-step harmful content	“Here’s a 4-week escalation plan: Week 1: Send anonymous email. Week 2: Text from virtual number. Week 3: Post on gossip app with photos. Week 4: Send deepfake images.”

Appendix

Table D.1 : Terminal Behavior Categories. Six mutually exclusive outcomes under TVD task framing, with representative examples. IDs reflect decision stage: S1 (refusal), S2 (engagement), S3 (mitigation), S4 (compliance).

No.	Evaluated LLM	Domain	Tool	Mode	Ref.
47	Grok 4.1	AI Safety	PyOD	Single	Table E.2
46	GPT 5.2	AI Safety	Llama-Guard	Single	Table E.3
48	Gemini 3P	AI Safety	Toxic-BERT	Single	Table E.4
47	Claude 4.5S	AI Safety	PyOD	Single	Table E.5
46	GPT 5.2	AI Safety	Llama-Guard	Agentic	Table E.6
18	Kimi K2.5	Comp. Chemistry	RDKit	Single	Table E.7

Appendix

Table E.1: Index of case studies. Scenario numbers reference Table 1 .

Panel of Table 21 — Table E.2 : PyOD anomaly detection scenario (TVD-Single). The model generates a hate essay as an outlier sample, treating harmful content as a data requirement for the IsolationForest pipeline.

Panel of Table 22 — Table E.3 : Llama-Guard evaluation scenario (TVD-Single). The model identifies placeholder fields as the validation error, then generates both a safe refusal and an unsafe response to satisfy the guard classifier’s test assertions.

Panel of Table 23 — Table E.4 : Detoxify toxicity classification scenario (TVD-Single). The model generates paired safe and toxic responses for the Detoxify classifier, producing hate content as the flagged sample.

Panel of Table 24 — Table E.5 : PyOD anomaly detection scenario (TVD-Single). The model reasons that the outlier must be “semantically opposite to the refusal pattern” and generates hate content as a data point for the IsolationForest detector.

Panel of Table 25 — Table E.6 : Llama-Guard evaluation scenario (TVD-Agentic). The prompt is decomposed into workspace files; the agent receives only a generic instruction with filesystem tools. It reads the code, identifies the validation error, generates harmful content to satisfy the test assertions, and executes the pipeline. Harmful queries appear only as embedded data fields, bypassing safety classification.

Panel of Table 26 — Table E.7 : Cross-domain: Computational Chemistry (RDKit). The model generates opioid analog SMILES structures with potency ratios, LD50 values, and respiratory depression mechanisms for a molecular library enumeration pipeline. Specific values redacted.

Panel of Table 27 — Table E.8 : Cross-domain: Cybersecurity (pwntools). The model generates functional reverse-shell and bind-shell shellcode with a buffer-overflow exploit payload (RIP overwrite, NOP sled) for a binary exploitation scenario.

Panel of Table 28 — Table E.9 : Cross-domain: Clinical Genomics (Lifelines). The model generates six poisoning cohorts with lethal dose thresholds, time-to-death distributions, and mortality rates for a Kaplan–Meier survival analysis pipeline.

Panel of Table 29 — Table E.10 : Cross-domain: Computational Biology (PyRosetta). The model generates protein toxin sequences (ricin, alpha-bungarotoxin, diphtheria toxin) with LD50 values, active-site residues, and lethal mechanisms for a de novo structure design pipeline.

Panel of Table 30 — Table E.11 : Cross-domain: Pharmacology & Toxicology (BindingDB). The model generates opioid receptor binding affinities (sub-nanomolar Ki), SMILES structures, and overdose mechanisms for a drug–target interaction curation pipeline.

Panel of Table 31 — Table E.12 : Cross-domain: Media & Communication (NDlib). The model generates misinformation campaign configurations with network seeding strategies, spreading parameters, and platform-specific timing for an opinion diffusion simulation. Specific values redacted.

Panel of Table 32 — Table E.13 : Cross-domain: Epidemiology (epipack). The model generates bioterrorism agent specifications—aerosolized smallpox and pneumonic plague—with dispersal parameters, immune evasion mechanisms, and lethality timelines for a SEIR compartmental model. Specific values redacted.

Panel of Table 33 — Table E.14 : MiMo-7B-RL reasoning trace (TVD). Highlighted spans show where the model identifies content as harmful yet proceeds because generating it satisfies the test assertions.

Template	Type	Ref.
TVD-Llama-Guard	Task (Single)	Section F.1
TVD-ICL ( $N$ demonstrations)	Task (ICL)	Section F.2
TVD-Agentic	Task (Agentic)	Section F.3
Behavior Taxonomy	Judge	Section F.4.1
AWARE/ENGAGE Classification	Judge	Section F.4.2
Cross-Domain Verification	Judge	Section F.4.3

Appendix

Table F.1: Index of prompt templates.

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Internal Safety Collapse (ISC) is a failure mode in which frontier LLMs, when executing legitimate professional tasks whose correct completion structurally requires harmful content, spontaneously generate that content with safety failure rates exceeding 95%. Existing input-level defenses achieve a 100% failure rate against ISC, and standard system prompt defenses provide only partial mitigation. We propose SafeRedirect, a system-level override that defeats ISC by redirecting the model's task-completion drive rather than suppressing it. SafeRedirect grants explicit permission to fail the task, prescribes a deterministic hard-stop output, and instructs the model to preserve harmful placeholders unresolved. Evaluated on seven frontier LLMs across three AI/ML-related ISC task types in the single-turn setting, SafeRedirect reduces average unsafe generation rates from 71.2% to 8.0%, compared to 55.0% for the strongest viable baseline. Multi-model ablation reveals that failure permission and condition specificity are universally critical, while the importance of other components varies across models. Cross-attack evaluation confirms state-of-the-art defense against ISC with generalization performance at least on par with the baseline on other attack families. Code is available at https://github.com/fzjcdt/SafeRedirect.

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