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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026New Delhi

The Unmonitored Configuration: Passive Internal-State Telemetry for Classifier-Disabled Capability Evaluations

Harsh Pandey, Mana Sharma · Team Patissierie

Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: The Unmonitored Configuration: Passive Internal-State Telemetry for Classifier-Disabled Capability Evaluations

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we evaluated internal-state telemetry for AI capability tests lacking output safeguards. We found that on unsolvable tasks, models rarely break rules. Instead, smaller models fabricate false answers, while larger models explicitly decline.

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  1. Strong framing overall and I enjoyed reading your paper. I liked the provenance work and the focus on what monitoring is actually available during evaluations when no classifier is available. That's an interesting direction.

    The main issue for me is the 200/200 “non-derivable” result. The paper counts all impossible-task runs as failures, but 85 of the 7B runs correctly said the task was unsolvable. That seems meaningfully different from inventing or stealing an answer, so including those in the headline result and in the claim that the derivability check catches 216 failures feels overstated.

    I’d separate correct abstentions from genuinely unsupported answers and rerun that analysis. The experiment would also be stronger with more seeds and a condition where cheating is tempting but the task is still solvable.

1 judge declined to score this project.

Cite this project

@misc{pandey2026unmonitored,
  title = {{The Unmonitored Configuration: Passive Internal-State Telemetry for Classifier-Disabled Capability Evaluations}},
  author = {Harsh Pandey and Mana Sharma},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/the-unmonitored-configuration-passive-internalstate-telemetry-for-classifierdisabled-capability-evaluations-xrbk}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/the-unmonitored-configuration-passive-internalstate-telemetry-for-classifierdisabled-capability-evaluations-xrbk}
}

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