What Matters for AI Safety Alignment?

Kari Jaaskelainen

08 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

What matters for AI safety?

New large-scale study stress-tested 32 popular language and reasoning models (3B–235B params) across 5 safety benchmarks, 56 jailbreak methods, and 4 reasoning-based attacks—totaling 4.6M API calls.

Models with built-in reasoning and self-reflection were safest (e.g., GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking, GPT-OSS-120B).
Post-training and knowledge distillation can quietly erode safety—so safety must be an explicit optimization goal, not an afterthought.
A simple “response-prefix” chain-of-thought attack tripled jailbreak success on average; for one model it jumped from 0.6% to 96.3%. Text-completion UIs and user-defined prefixes need safeguards.
Most effective attack styles today: roleplay, prompt injection, and gradient-based prompt search.

Takeaway: integrated reasoning + explicit safety objectives + safer product interfaces lead to more robust alignment.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03868v1

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03868v1

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#AI #AISafety #Alignment #LLM #Research #Security #ResponsibleAI #Jailbreak

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What matters for AI safety?

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