mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Trojan-Speak: Bypassing Constitutional Classifiers with No Jailbreak Tax via Adversarial Finetuning

arXiv 2603.29038 ↗First posted 30 Mar 2026cs.CR cs.AI cs.CLcited by 1

On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking

Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-tuning APIs offered by major AI providers create new attack surfaces where adversaries can bypass safety measures through targeted fine-tuning. We introduce Trojan-Speak, an adversarial fine-tuning method that bypasses Anthropic's Constitutional Classifiers. Our approach uses curriculum learning combined with GRPO-based hybrid reinforcement learning to teach models a communication protocol that evades LLM-based content classification. Crucially, while prior adversarial fine-tuning approaches report more than 25% capability degradation on reasoning benchmarks, Trojan-Speak incurs less than 5% degradation while achieving 99+% classifier evasion for models with 14B+ parameters. We demonstrate that fine-tuned models can provide detailed responses to expert-level CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) queries from Anthropic's Constitutional Classifiers bug-bounty program. Our findings reveal that LLM-based content classifiers alone are insufficient for preventing dangerous information disclosure when adversaries have fine-tuning access, and we show that activation-level probes can substantially improve robustness to such attacks.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2026.

Builds on

29 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming31 Jan
  2. 2024Badllama 3: removing safety finetuning from Llama 3 in minutes1 Jul
  3. 2023GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher12 Aug
  4. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?5 Jul

Other references · 25

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  2. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
  3. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,371
  4. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
  5. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,344
  6. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,879
  7. 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,848
  8. 2023Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparencycited by 1,336
  9. 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,207
  10. 2023Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!cited by 1,154
  11. 2024Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Directioncited by 1,032
  12. 2024Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Trainingcited by 529
13 more
  1. 2024The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearningcited by 509
  2. 2023LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Datasetcited by 461
  3. 2023Removing RLHF Protections in GPT-4 via Fine-Tuningcited by 171
  4. 2025Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Modelscited by 158
  5. 2025Qwen3Guard Technical Reportcited by 155
  6. 2024Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilitiescited by 128
  7. 2024Vaccine: Perturbation-aware Alignment for Large Language Models against Harmful Fine-tuning Attackcited by 115
  8. 2024Covert Malicious Finetuning: Challenges in Safeguarding LLM Adaptationcited by 80
  9. 2024Obfuscated Activations Bypass LLM Latent-Space Defensescited by 45
  10. 2025Towards Safeguarding LLM Fine-tuning APIs against Cipher Attackscited by 11
  11. 2025All Code, No Thought: Current Language Models Struggle to Reason in Ciphered Languagecited by 8
  12. 2025Quantifying CBRN Risk in Frontier Modelscited by 6
  13. 2025Contemporary AI foundation models increase biological weapons riskcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Detecting Adversarial Fine-tuning with Auditing Agents
  2. 2026Open-Weight LLM Fine-Tuning Defenses are Susceptible to Simple Attacks
  3. 2026Jailbreaking Large Language Models through Iterative Tool-Disguised Attacks via Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2026TrojanPraise: Jailbreak LLMs via Benign Fine-Tuning
  5. 2026CourtGuard: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Zero-Shot Policy Adaptation in LLM Safety
  6. 2026Arbitrary Cipher Attacks Against Large Language Models Do Not Require Fine-Tuning
  7. 2021A Synergetic Attack against Neural Network Classifiers combining Backdoor and Adversarial Examples
  8. 2024Breach By A Thousand Leaks: Unsafe Information Leakage in `Safe' AI Responses