Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety

Understand

AI systems that "think" in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought (CoT) for the intent to misbehave.

• Like all other known AI oversight methods, CoT monitoring is imperfect and allows some misbehavior to go unnoticed.
• Nevertheless, it shows promise and we recommend further research into CoT monitorability and investment in CoT monitoring alongside existing safety methods.
• Because CoT monitorability may be fragile, we recommend that frontier model developers consider the impact of development decisions on CoT monitorability.