Jailbreaking Frontier Foundation Models Through Intention Deception
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
Large (vision-)language models exhibit remarkable capability but remain highly susceptible to jailbreaking. Existing safety training approaches aim to have the model learn a refusal boundary between safe and unsafe, based on the user's intent. It has been found that this binary training regime often leads to brittleness, since the user intent cannot reliably be evaluated, especially if the attacker obfuscates their intent, and also makes the system seem unhelpful. In response, frontier models, such as GPT-5, have shifted from refusal-based safeguards to safe completion, that aims to maximize helpfulness while obeying safety constraints. However, safe completion could be exploited when a user pretends their intention is benign. Specifically, this intent inversion would be effective in multi-turn conversation, where the attacker has multiple opportunities to reinforce their deceptively benign intent. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-turn jailbreaking method that exploits this vulnerability. Our approach gradually builds conversational trust by simulating benign-seeming intentions and by exploiting the consistency property of the model, ultimately guiding the target model toward harmful, detailed outputs. Most crucially, our approach also uncovered an additional class of model vulnerability that we call para-jailbreaking that has been unnoticed up to now. Para-jailbreaking describes the situation where the model may not reveal harmful direct reply to the attack query, however the information that it reveals is nevertheless harmful. Our contributions are threefold. First, it achieves high success rates against frontier models including GPT-5-thinking and Claude-Sonnet-4.5. Second, our approach revealed and addressed para-jailbreaking harmful output. Third, experiments on multimodal VLM models showed that our approach outperformed state-of-the-art models.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2026.
Builds on
0 of 0 references.
No references here yet.
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025SAID: Safety-Aware Intent Defense via Prefix Probing for Large Language Models
- 2024Intention Analysis Makes LLMs A Good Jailbreak Defender
- 2025Automating Deception: Scalable Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreaks
- 2026Does the Unsafe Gradient Survive a Conversation? On the Fragility of Gradient-Based Jailbreak Detection in Multi-Turn Dialogue
- 2024Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models
- 2025Reasoned Safety Alignment: Ensuring Jailbreak Defense via Answer-Then-Check
- 2024Large Language Models Are Involuntary Truth-Tellers: Exploiting Fallacy Failure for Jailbreak Attacks
- 2025Bidirectional Intention Inference Enhances LLMs' Defense Against Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks