Learning Steganography Is Easy, Learning Steganographic Reasoning Is Hard

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.39838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought monitoring as an approach for AI oversight and control is threatened by the possibility of steganographic reasoning, where LLMs conceal their reasoning inside innocuous-looking text. Two neighbouring capabilities, steganographic messaging (passing a concealed message) and encoded reasoning (reasoning in an illegible but unconcealed format), have already been shown to emerge under training pressures that occur in real pipelines, s