mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Jailbroken Frontier Models Retain Their Capabilities

arXiv 2605.00267 ↗First posted 30 Apr 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CRcited by 1

On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking

Abstract (arXiv)

As language model safeguards become more robust, attackers are pushed toward developing increasingly complex jailbreaks. Prior work has found that this complexity imposes a "jailbreak tax" that degrades the target model's task performance. We show that this tax scales inversely with model capability and that the most advanced jailbreaks effectively yield no reduction in model capabilities. Evaluating 28 jailbreaks on five benchmarks across Claude models ranging in capability from Haiku 4.5 to Opus 4.6, we find Haiku 4.5 loses an average of 33.1% on benchmark performance when jailbroken, while Opus 4.6 at max thinking effort loses only 7.7%. We also observe that across all models, reasoning-heavy tasks display considerably more degradation than knowledge-recall tasks. Finally, Boundary Point Jailbreaking, currently the strongest jailbreak against deployed classifiers, achieves near-perfect classifier evasion with near-zero degradation across safeguarded models. We recommend that safety cases for frontier models should not rely on a meaningful capability degradation from jailbreaks.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 22 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2026.

Builds on

22 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Boundary Point Jailbreaking of Black-Box LLMs16 Feb
  2. 2025Confusion is the Final Barrier: Rethinking Jailbreak Evaluation and Investigating the Real Misuse Threat of LLMs22 Aug
  3. 2025The Jailbreak Tax: How Useful are Your Jailbreak Outputs?14 Apr
  4. 2025Speak Easy: Eliciting Harmful Jailbreaks from LLMs with Simple Interactions6 Feb
  5. 2025Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming31 Jan
  6. 2024A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreaks15 Feb
  7. 2024How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs12 Jan
  8. 2023Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically4 Dec
  9. 2023Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries12 Oct
  10. 2023SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks5 Oct
  11. 2023Detecting Language Model Attacks with Perplexity27 Aug
  12. 2023GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher12 Aug
2 more
  1. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models27 Jul
  2. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?5 Jul

Other references · 8

  1. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  2. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  3. 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,330
  4. 2022Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Modelscited by 760
  5. 2023Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Modelscited by 608
  6. 2023An Overview of Catastrophic AI Riskscited by 214
  7. 2025Virology Capabilities Test (VCT): A Multimodal Virology Q&A Benchmarkcited by 27
  8. 2025All Code, No Thought: Current Language Models Struggle to Reason in Ciphered Languagecited by 7

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