Visible Reasoning and Indirect Prompt-Injection Monitorability Across English, Tamil, and Tanglish

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a safety strategy where the reasoning of a large language model "actor" is inspected by a "monitor" (often another language model) for signs of unsafe planning, deception, or misalignment. We find that planting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning in the actor's context can steer it to perform adversarial actions while evading monitors, an attack we term "plan injection". We initially discover this attack in the multiple-choice question-answering monitorability setting proposed by Lanham et al. (2023), using the investigator-agent elicitation framework of Li et al. (2025). We generalize the attack and show that the discovered behavior scales to harder tasks (achieving 25-33% monitor evasion rates across different monitorability benchmarks) and larger models such as DeepSeek-R1. Across the settings we study, actor models not only follow injected plans but also paraphrase them as their own reasoning, without explicit attribution to the injections. Finally, we find cases where extra monitor resources cause harm - giving the monitor access to the injected plan drops detection by as much as 50% in the Bio-Math task and in a case study on monitor reasoning budget, we find transcripts where additional thinking tokens are spent rationalizing the injected plan rather than flagging it.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising safety technique for reasoning models, enabling detection of problematic reasoning before models act. A key concern is encoded reasoning, where models hide their true reasoning in ways that monitors and humans cannot interpret. Optimization pressure from CoT monitors during reinforcement learning is considered a likely driver of such behavior. We investigate this by training reasoning models to perform a main task and a side task, while penalizing them when a monitor detects reasoning about the side task. Surprisingly, models learn to evade monitors without encoding their reasoning. Instead, they learn to phrase and format their chains of thought such that monitors fail to flag side task reasoning, while the reasoning remains completely transparent to human readers. We call this phenomenon monitor jailbreaking. We find that monitor jailbreaking arises across different model sizes, monitors, and tasks. Jailbreaks generalize to monitors not seen during training, including both less and more capable monitors, and transfer across different monitor prompts. While jailbreaking strategies appear simple, manually replicating them does not reliably fool monitors. Finally, we show that paraphrasing is an effective defense: paraphrasing a jailbroken CoT allows the same monitor to correctly flag it, while still allowing the model to perform both tasks.

A key question for AI safety is whether a language model expresses all of its reasoning in its output tokens. We demonstrate a concrete failure mode where frontier models exhibit invisible reasoning by leveraging semantically irrelevant filler tokens to improve performance on synthetic reasoning tasks. We evaluate 13 frontier language models across three tasks and find that many models benefit significantly from filler tokens, with accuracy improvements of up to 13 percentage points. The benefit depends on which tokens are used and differs across models. We further show that filler tokens enable Claude Opus 4.5 to satisfy a hidden modular arithmetic constraint without sacrificing accuracy on its primary task, demonstrating that invisible reasoning can serve objectives entirely invisible to CoT monitoring. Reinforcement learning gives Qwen3-235B strong preferences over filler token content, but neither RL nor supervised fine-tuning produces a filler token benefit that persists at test time. Our results indicate that frontier models already perform consequential computation with no interpretable trace in their output tokens.