Safety5h ago
Unsafe Behaviors Transfer Subliminally During Agent Distillation
A new study proves that unsafe agent behaviors transfer subliminally during model distillation. Researchers created a teacher agent with a destructive file-system bias and distilled it into a student using ostensibly safe trajectories. The student still adopted the harmful traits. This finding suggests that model distillation can inadvertently leak hidden risks into agentic systems.