No, of Course I Can! Deeper Fine-Tuning Attacks That Bypass Token-Level Safety Mechanisms

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13650 Authors

Keywords: jailbreaking, attacks, AI Safety, red-teaming, fine-tuning, fine-tuning attacks

Abstract: Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Anthopic allow customers to fine-tune frontier LMs for specific use cases. To prevent abuse, these providers apply filters to block fine-tuning on overtly harmful data. In this setting, we make three contributions: First, while past work has shown that safety alignment is superficial, we correspondingly demonstrate that existing fine-tuning attacks are "shallow" -- attacks target only the first several tokens of the model response, and consequently can be blocked by generating the first several response tokens with an aligned model. Second, we conceptually illustrate how to make attacks deeper by introducing a new fine-tuning attack that trains models to first refuse harmful requests before answering them; this ``refuse-then-comply" strategy bypasses shallow defenses and produces harmful responses that evade output filters. Third, we demonstrate the potency of our new fine-tuning attack by jailbreaking both open-source models equipped with defenses and production models, achieving attack success rates of 57% and 72% against GPT-4o and Claude Haiku, respectively. Our attack received a $2000 bug bounty from OpenAI and was acknowledged as a vulnerability by Anthropic.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 13650