“From overeliciting to undereliciting LLM propensities in just a few months” by David Africa

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 25, 2026 · 3m

For a while, we felt we had a pretty good grasp over LLM behaviour because we had to exert significant effort to elicit misaligned behaviour. Then, fairly suddenly, we moved to undereliciting misaligned behaviour. Let us recount:

For a while, there was a bit where safety research seemed to over-elicit bad propensities. A common criticism of papers like Agentic Misalignment was that they basically led the witness using prompting.

I recall that a paper even as recent as Peer-preservation took similar flak on Twitter.

But now, we are instead under-eliciting bad propensities, and bad behavior…