Adversaries Can Misuse Combinations of Safe Models

Evidence card

Claim

Testing each model in isolation can miss misuse enabled by decomposing a task across models.

Evidence level

Experimentally observed

Source

https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/jones25a.html

Publication date

2025-07-13

Authors or institution

Erik Jones, Anca Dragan, Jacob Steinhardt

System tested

Combinations of individually safer models across misuse-oriented task decompositions.

Limitations

Specific tasks, models, and decomposition methods; not a universal result for every system.

What the evidence does show

Testing each model in isolation can miss misuse enabled by decomposing a task across models.

What the evidence does not show

That all model combinations are unsafe or that safe frontier models directly produce harmful output.

Date last reviewed in UTC

2026-06-26T00:00:00Z