mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Do System Prompts Leave Behavioral Fingerprints? A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Clone Detection via Output Similarity

arXiv 2608.24461 ↗First posted 25 Aug 2026cs.CRcited by 4

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

System prompts can be extracted from commercial LLMs with over 80% success and redeployed at zero cost, yet a prompt owner has no way to verify whether a suspected deployment is a clone. We propose Black-Box Behavioral Fingerprinting (BBF): the prompt owner registers a behavioral signature from model outputs and later tests whether a suspect deployment matches that signature more closely than an unrelated baseline. BBF requires only black-box API access. Through a large-scale study (4 model families, 8 benchmarks, 288,000 responses), we find that prompt choice explains 24.4% of output variance and same-model detection reaches AUC 0.876. Cross-model performance is bounded by detector identity, with off-diagonal AUC ranging from 0.845 (Claude as detector) down to 0.665 (Qwen) and overall mean 0.725. BBF resists non-adaptive prompt paraphrasing (AUC ≥ 0.889) and is robust to imperfect extraction, but a single-sentence formal-tone prefix can collapse detection on short structured outputs (MNLI 0.978 → 0.547), isolating style-invariant detection as the key open problem. Diagnostic Query Optimization, a zero-cost query selection rule, adds +0.120 to cross-model AUC.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2026.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.