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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Yang, Fan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10032
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author Yang, Fan
author_facet Yang, Fan
contents Thinking mode has always been regarded as one of the most valuable modes in LLMs. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: LLMs with thinking mode are more easily broken by Jailbreak attack. We evaluate 9 LLMs on AdvBench and HarmBench and find that the success rate of attacking thinking mode in LLMs is almost higher than that of non-thinking mode. Through large numbers of sample studies, it is found that for educational purposes and excessively long thinking lengths are the characteristics of successfully attacked data, and LLMs also give harmful answers when they mostly know that the questions are harmful. In order to alleviate the above problems, this paper proposes a method of safe thinking intervention for LLMs, which explicitly guides the internal thinking processes of LLMs by adding "specific thinking tokens" of LLMs to the prompt. The results demonstrate that the safe thinking intervention can significantly reduce the attack success rate of LLMs with thinking mode.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10032
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Cost of Thinking: Increased Jailbreak Risk in Large Language Models
Yang, Fan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Thinking mode has always been regarded as one of the most valuable modes in LLMs. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: LLMs with thinking mode are more easily broken by Jailbreak attack. We evaluate 9 LLMs on AdvBench and HarmBench and find that the success rate of attacking thinking mode in LLMs is almost higher than that of non-thinking mode. Through large numbers of sample studies, it is found that for educational purposes and excessively long thinking lengths are the characteristics of successfully attacked data, and LLMs also give harmful answers when they mostly know that the questions are harmful. In order to alleviate the above problems, this paper proposes a method of safe thinking intervention for LLMs, which explicitly guides the internal thinking processes of LLMs by adding "specific thinking tokens" of LLMs to the prompt. The results demonstrate that the safe thinking intervention can significantly reduce the attack success rate of LLMs with thinking mode.
title The Cost of Thinking: Increased Jailbreak Risk in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10032