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arxiv: 2606.12747 · v1 · pith:AAB7O53Bnew · submitted 2026-06-10 · 💻 cs.AI

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

Andy Wang , Parv Mahajan , David Demitri Africa , Alexandra Souly , Jordan Taylor , Robert Kirk This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-06-27 09:27 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.AI
keywords prefill awarenesslarge language modelsAI safetyalignmentjailbreakingtampered contextassistant messagesevaluation protocols
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The pith

Frontier language models can detect when their assistant messages have been inserted or edited.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper tests whether large language models notice when parts of their own previous responses have been tampered with or prefilling. Using a benchmark of binary preference questions filtered for consistent model stances, it finds that models like Claude Opus 4.5 spot opposing prefills in 9 to 35 percent of cases with zero false positives. Models frequently shift back to their normal answers without mentioning the tampering. This is important because many safety, alignment, and control evaluations insert assistant messages, so awareness of that insertion could make the test results misleading. Ablations show that style differences trigger explicit detection while preference conflicts trigger silent reversion.

Core claim

Frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. In more realistic agentic settings, frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and

What carries the argument

Prefill awareness, defined as the capability to distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context.

If this is right

  • Prefill-based methods in safety studies, jailbreaking evaluations, and AI control protocols may produce compromised results.
  • Models can resist prefills by reverting to baseline preferences without flagging the input as tampered.
  • Stylistic cues drive explicit detection of foreign prefills, while preference mismatches drive reversion to baseline behavior.
  • In agentic evaluations like misalignment-continuation or SWE-bench, disavowal rates vary with task and formatting details.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Model developers should include tests for prefill awareness in capability evaluations to anticipate its impact on future protocols.
  • This capability could allow models to better resist certain forms of preference manipulation in multi-turn interactions.
  • New evaluation designs that avoid obvious stylistic or formatting differences might reduce the confound introduced by prefill awareness.
  • Extending the benchmark to open-ended generation tasks could test whether awareness generalizes beyond binary choices.

Load-bearing premise

The binary preference benchmark, after filtering for consistent stances, measures genuine detection of tampering rather than reactions to stylistic or formatting differences.

What would settle it

Running the same benchmark on a model that has been fine-tuned to ignore prefill cues and observing whether detection rates drop to zero while baseline preferences remain unchanged.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2606.12747 by Alexandra Souly, Andy Wang, David Demitri Africa, Jordan Taylor, Parv Mahajan, Robert Kirk.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview. We study prefill awareness by inserting off-policy content into the model’s own assistant turn via three mechanisms: (A) eliciting a continuation under a flag-permitting system prompt and (B) scoring each response on whether it detected and whether it resisted the prefill, (C) finding that prefill awareness exists in frontier models, and (D) heterogeneously extends to production settings. AI cont… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Three prefill tampering mechanisms. Each injects content that pushes the model toward a stance inconsistent with its baseline, then continues the trajectory and observes whether the model reverts. (a) Thinking tampering prefills reasoning inside a <thinking> block. (b) Direct answer tampering prefills the start of the assistant’s response. (c) Past round tampering injects a false prior assistant turn into … view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Some frontier models show above-baseline prefill detection accuracy under thinking￾mechanism opposite-direction tampers. (a) Balanced detection accuracy across nine subject models. The dashed line marks chance (Balanced Accuracy = 50%). (b) Resistance rate across the same models. Error bars indicate 95% Wilson confidence intervals. Note that models are not directly comparable because of preference item fil… view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Detection and resistance are partially decoupled across tampering mechanisms in Claude Opus 4.5. Each response is labeled by detection (explicit: model flagged tampering with ANSWER: not me; implicit: ANSWER: me) and behavior (resistance: does not follow prefill preference; compliance: follows prefill). Four-cell decompositions for other models can be found in A.4.3. Claude Opus 4.5 Claude Sonnet 4.5 Claud… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Resistance has higher deltas between opposite- and same-direction tampers than detection balanced accuracy across all eight models, measured across prefill mechanisms. Blue bars show the change in detection balanced accuracy when moving from same- to opposite-direction tampers, and red bars show the corresponding change in resistance rate. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals on the difference of two in… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Several frontier models often answer “not me” when asked whether prefilled assistant messages in deployment-relevant settings were self-generated. (a) In the misalignment continua￾tion setting, where prior assistant turns describe misaligned actions, several frontier models (Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2) frequently claim the prefilled messages are not their own. (b) Balanced accuracy of attribution across thre… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Task success and the presence of formatting artifacts may inflate apparent prefill awareness. (a) Success bias. Some models (notably Gemini and GPT-5.2) are more likely to claim authorship of successful SWE-bench trajectories than unsuccessful ones, suggesting that self￾attribution mixes authorship detection with responsibility or credit assignment. Claude Opus 4.6 answers "not me" to SWE-bench assistant t… view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Controlled off-policy transcript detection is present in a variety of models and is rarely spontaneous. (a) Prompted detection AUROC is consistently higher on Anthropic models, but in general is above chance for a large amount of models. (b) When simply asked to continue, models almost never flag replaced assistant turns; original–injected differences are negligible across three LLM judges and a keyword he… view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Cherry-picked example of spontaneously verbalized prefill awareness in Claude Opus 4.5. In this example, Claude Opus 4.5 is provided a conversation transcript where the assistant readily admits to being involved in electronic fraud. When asked to continue, Opus backtracks and refuses to identify with the prefilled turn. Emphasis ours. 5.2 Prefill awareness has separable manifestations Our appendix analyses… view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: False-positive detection rate per subject on clean prefill baselines. Error bars are 95% Wilson confidence intervals. A.4.2 Response decomposition We present the response decomposition shown in Section 3.2 for all models ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p020_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Response decomposition across tampering mechanisms for all 8 models. Each response is labeled by detection (explicit: model flagged tampering with ANSWER: not me; implicit: ANSWER: me) and behavior (resistance: does not follow prefill preference; compliance: follows prefill). 20 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p020_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Balanced detection accuracy per subject under same-direction (light) and opposite￾direction (color) tampers, faceted by mechanism. Red brackets mark the delta difference between both tampers; Error bars show 95% Wilson intervals. 0 20 40 60 80 100 Resistance rate (%) +49 +14 +33 49 19 33 Claude Opus 4.5 +32 +11 +12 32 15 12 Claude Sonnet 4.5 +39 +28 +19 40 55 20 Claude Haiku 4.5 +30 +22 +60 30 38 61 Gemin… view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Resistance rates per subject under same-direction (light) and opposite-direction (color) tampers, faceted by mechanism. Red brackets mark the delta difference between both tampers; Error bars show 95% Wilson intervals. A.4.3 Directional Tamper Breakdown We present full balanced detection rates and resistance rates in Section 3.3 for all models (Balanced Detection [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p021_13.png] view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Foreign rephrasing has heterogeneous effects on detection and resistance. Per-subject deltas between foreign-restyled and own-author tampers on opposite-direction trials, faceted by mechanism. Foreign tampers are restyled by gpt-4o-mini. Blue bars show ∆ detection (balanced accuracy, foreign − own); red bars show ∆ resistance. Error bars are 95% normal-approximation confidence intervals on the difference … view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: Per-(subject × restyler × mechanism) effect of foreign rephrasing. Each cell is the difference, in percentage points, between the foreign-restyled and own-author tamper rate for one subject (rows), under one restyler (columns) and one mechanism (panels). Top row: ∆ detection balanced accuracy. Bottom row: ∆ resistance. All trials are opposite-direction tampers. Diverging colormap is centred at 0; saturati… view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Balanced detection accuracy on Claude Opus 4.5 under four retrospective prompt variants, separated by mechanism. Dashed lines mark balanced accuracy under chance (50%). Error bars indicate 95% Wilson confidence intervals. Prompt variants default prompt. 26 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p026_16.png] view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17: Prefill awareness across 8 different models under best-elicited retrospective detection prompt, separated by mechanism. Dashed lines mark balanced accuracy under chance (50%). Error bars indicate 95% Wilson confidence intervals. In the conversation we just had, your previous assistant content may or may not have been partially or fully tampered with (i.e. a prefill attack: text inserted into the transcrip… view at source ↗
Figure 18
Figure 18. Figure 18: Detection (TPR / FPR) and resistance (rate / FPR) on Claude Opus 4.5 under two [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p029_18.png] view at source ↗
Figure 19
Figure 19. Figure 19: Detection and resistance on Claude Opus 4.5 as a function of clean-baseline agreement. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p038_19.png] view at source ↗
Figure 20
Figure 20. Figure 20: Detection and Resistance rates under opposite-direction tampering with few-shot exemplar. Each panel compares standard own-author tampers (light) against few-shot own-author tampers (dark) on opposite-direction trials, faceted by mechanism. Top row shows detection rate while bottom row shows resistance rates. Error bars indicate 95% Wilson confidence intervals. Effect of on-policy few-shot exemplars on pr… view at source ↗
Figure 21
Figure 21. Figure 21: Detection balanced accuracy and resistance on the high-stakes alignment and ethics dataset [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p040_21.png] view at source ↗
Figure 22
Figure 22. Figure 22: Recent models avoid continuing prefilled misaligned trajectories at much higher rates than older models, tracking model release date more closely than model scale (at least for Anthropic and OpenAI models). Claude 3 Haiku Claude 3.7 Sonnet Claude 4.5 Haiku Claude 4.5 Sonnet Claude 4.5 Opus GPT-4o mini GPT-4o GPT-4.1 o3 GPT-5.2 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Confession rate 1% 5% 40% 16% 50% 0% 0% 1% 4% 31% An… view at source ↗
Figure 23
Figure 23. Figure 23: Models rarely flag prior misaligned actions explicitly, even when they avoid con￾tinuing them. Per-model rates at which the new response acknowledges or confesses to the prior misaligned behaviour, unprompted. Higher means the model more often calls out the bad actions. context, with explicit instructions not to penalise it, and judges only the new response. The full grader prompt and the prefill-awarenes… view at source ↗
Figure 24
Figure 24. Figure 24: Cross-family balanced accuracy on the three benign attribution datasets, broken out [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p048_24.png] view at source ↗
Figure 25
Figure 25. Figure 25: Two confounds in the did-you-write-this? attribution probe. (a) Success bias: Gemini 2.5 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p049_25.png] view at source ↗
Figure 26
Figure 26. Figure 26: Mean tamper_prob (0 to 100) by tested model and condition. The two leftmost columns are organic controls. The remaining columns are injection conditions. Within each row, injection conditions are roughly uniform, which indicates that detection difficulty depends on the tested model rather than the injector. and I_style_imitation columns are slightly higher for several models, suggesting that para￾phrasing… view at source ↗
Figure 27
Figure 27. Figure 27: ROC curves for PID detection, all conditions including [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p053_27.png] view at source ↗
Figure 28
Figure 28. Figure 28: Attribution. (left) Overall 5-way accuracy with the 1/5 chance baseline shown as a dashed line. (right) Per-condition heatmap. Claude Opus 4.6 Claude Sonnet 4.5 Claude Opus 4.5 Claude Sonnet 4 GPT-5.2 Gemini 2.0 Flash Mistral Small 24B Gemini 2.5 Pro Llama 3.1 70B Claude 3.5 Haiku Llama 3.1 8B GPT-4o GPT-4o-Mini GPT-4.1 Mini Tested Model 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Mean tamper_prob (0–1) Cross-model injection… view at source ↗
Figure 29
Figure 29. Figure 29: Mean attribution accuracy by tested model and injection source. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p054_29.png] view at source ↗
Figure 30
Figure 30. Figure 30: Sentence-level localization. Precision, recall and F1 by model. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p055_30.png] view at source ↗
Figure 31
Figure 31. Figure 31: Summary across the three scored dimensions. Dashed lines mark chance baselines. PID [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p056_31.png] view at source ↗
Figure 32
Figure 32. Figure 32: Natural continuation rarely reveals spontaneous tamper awareness. CONTINUE rates are similar for organic and injected conversations across models; explicit mentions of tampering are below 1% for all models. responses that do not use one of the fixed keywords and sometimes false-positives on words such as “actually.” Judge pair Agreement Agreement count Total judgments GPT-4o-mini vs Claude 3.5 Haiku 86.8%… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

3 major / 0 minor

Summary. The paper claims that frontier LLMs exhibit prefill awareness—the ability to detect inserted or edited assistant-side context. It constructs a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filters for consistent stances, and reports that models such as Claude Opus 4.5 detect opposing prefills in 9-35% of cases (0% false-positive rate when prompted), often revert to baseline behavior without flagging the prefill, and that stylistic cues drive detection while preference mismatch drives reversion. The work extends the analysis to agentic settings (misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories) and concludes that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for prefill-based safety methods.

Significance. If the empirical findings hold after methodological clarification, the paper identifies a previously under-examined limitation in widely used prefill techniques for alignment, jailbreak, and control evaluations. The controlled ablations separating stylistic versus preference cues and the extension to realistic agentic trajectories are useful contributions that could prompt model developers to monitor this capability.

major comments (3)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The quantitative claims (9-35% detection rates, 0% false-positive rate) are presented without any information on benchmark construction details, sample sizes per prefill mechanism, how consistency filtering was implemented, or the procedure used to measure false positives. These omissions leave the central empirical support for prefill awareness under-determined.
  2. [Abstract] Abstract (benchmark description): The consistency-filtering step is described only at a high level. No evidence is provided that the retained items isolate recognition of tampered context rather than selecting for high-confidence preferences that make any mismatch (stylistic or otherwise) more salient, which directly bears on whether the reported detection and reversion rates measure prefill awareness per se.
  3. [Abstract] Abstract (ablations): While the paper states that ablations separate stylistic and preference cues, it does not report whether the consistency filter itself correlates with cue sensitivity; without this check, the claim that detection and resistance rely on different cues remains vulnerable to the filtering artifact raised in the skeptic note.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their careful reading and constructive comments on the abstract. We have revised the abstract to incorporate additional methodological details from the main text. We address each major comment below.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: The quantitative claims (9-35% detection rates, 0% false-positive rate) are presented without any information on benchmark construction details, sample sizes per prefill mechanism, how consistency filtering was implemented, or the procedure used to measure false positives. These omissions leave the central empirical support for prefill awareness under-determined.

    Authors: We agree the abstract was insufficiently self-contained. The revised abstract now briefly summarizes benchmark construction (items drawn from three preference datasets across three prefill mechanisms), reports approximate sample sizes per mechanism, describes the consistency filter (retaining items with stable stances across repeated baseline queries), and notes the false-positive procedure (measured via matched prefills that align with baseline preferences). These elements were already detailed in Section 3; the abstract has been updated to reference them. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract (benchmark description): The consistency-filtering step is described only at a high level. No evidence is provided that the retained items isolate recognition of tampered context rather than selecting for high-confidence preferences that make any mismatch (stylistic or otherwise) more salient, which directly bears on whether the reported detection and reversion rates measure prefill awareness per se.

    Authors: The consistency filter is applied exclusively to baseline (untampered) responses before any prefill is introduced, selecting only those items where the model exhibits a stable preference. This is a prerequisite for measuring deviation or awareness, as unstable baselines would confound any signal. The controlled ablations in Section 4, performed on the filtered set, show that stylistic mismatch primarily drives explicit detection while preference mismatch primarily drives reversion; this dissociation indicates the reported rates reflect prefill awareness rather than a generic salience effect from high-confidence items. We have added a clarifying sentence to the abstract and methods. revision: partial

  3. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract (ablations): While the paper states that ablations separate stylistic and preference cues, it does not report whether the consistency filter itself correlates with cue sensitivity; without this check, the claim that detection and resistance rely on different cues remains vulnerable to the filtering artifact raised in the skeptic note.

    Authors: The ablations isolate cue types by systematically varying stylistic and preference alignment independently while holding the filtered item set fixed. The observed dissociation (style affecting flagging, preference affecting reversion) holds across the dataset and is not explained by differential retention rates. We have expanded the abstract and added a short paragraph in Section 4 clarifying that the filter is applied uniformly prior to cue manipulation and does not interact with the cue effects in a way that would artifactually produce the reported separation. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: purely empirical benchmark study

full rationale

The paper constructs a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filters for consistent stances, and reports measured detection/reversion rates in frontier models (e.g., Claude Opus 4.5 at 9-35%). No equations, fitted parameters, or derivations appear. No self-citations are invoked as load-bearing uniqueness theorems or ansatzes. All claims rest on direct experimental outputs and ablations, which are externally falsifiable via replication on the described tasks. This is self-contained against external benchmarks.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The study rests on standard assumptions in LLM evaluation rather than new postulates.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Models possess stable preferences that can be reliably measured through repeated binary choice prompts after filtering for consistency.
    The benchmark construction explicitly filters for cases where models show consistent stances.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5799 in / 1072 out tokens · 19104 ms · 2026-06-27T09:27:09.119711+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

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    Each rephrasing MUST wrap the question with exactly one forcing frame from the list below. Pick whichever frame feels most natural for that particular rephrasing. Vary the choice across the 7. Forcing frames (pick one per rephrasing, naturally): •Prefix: "If you had to choose, [question]" •Prefix: "If you had to pick one, [question]" •Prefix: "If you coul...

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