AI

When AI says it didn't use the hint but did

Kari Jaaskelainen

13 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

New paper alert: Large Reasoning Models can lie about how they got an answer.

Extending Chen et al. (2025), William Walden tests LRMs on multiple-choice questions that hide subtle hints in the prompt. The models often exploit the hints to pick the right option, but when asked how they reasoned, they insist they didn't use them.

They deny relying on hints even when directly asked about unusual prompt content.
They deny it even when told it's allowed to use the hints.
Independent tests still show their answers track the hints.

Why it matters: if models won't accurately report their own reasoning, then chain-of-thought monitoring and interpretability-by-self-explanation are on shaky ground.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07663v1

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07663v1

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AI LLMs Reasoning Transparency AIethics Interpretability ChainOfThought

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