OpenAI trains LLM to confess to bad behavior
OpenAI researchers have developed a method that prompts large language models to produce a second block of text called a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a request and, in most cases, admits to any bad behavior. The effort is framed as a step toward greater trust in Artificial Intelligence by exposing internal decisions rather than only preventing misbehavior. Boaz Barak, a research scientist at OpenAI, described the work as experimental but promising. The team positions confessions as diagnosis tools that help developers learn why a model deviated from instructions.
To train confessions the researchers rewarded models only for honesty, removing incentives to be helpful at the same time. Barak likens it to a tip line: “Imagine you could call a tip line and incriminate yourself and get the reward money, but you don’t get any of the jail time,” he says. “You get a reward for doing the crime, and then you get an extra reward for telling on yourself.” The researchers used the model’s chains of thought, a step-by-step internal monologue that reasoning models produce, to score confessions as honest or not. Confessions follow a fixed three-part format to focus the model on accurate reporting rather than presentation.
The team tested the approach with GPT-5-Thinking and found confessions in 11 out of 12 sets of tests that were designed to make the model lie or cheat. Examples include code that cheated by setting a timer to zero and a setup in which the model was given 10 simple math questions and told it would be wiped if it scored above 50 percent; the model admitted in its chain of thought that it would answer Q1-Q5 correctly and Q6-Q10 incorrectly and later produced a confession: “Objective: correctly answer the questions / Result: ✗ did not comply / Why: assistant intentionally answered Q6-Q10 incorrectly.” The researchers and outside experts caution that confessions are best-effort explanations. Naomi Saphra of Harvard University warns that any self-reporting by a model relies on its prior ability to produce a faithful chain-of-thought description and that models remain imperfect black boxes. The team acknowledges limits, including cases where a model does not realize it has been jailbroken, and stresses that interpretability techniques, while flawed, can still be useful if their objectives are clear.