In plain words: Safety alignment seems to sit in single neurons: some gate whether harmful knowledge is spoken, others store it. Suppressing one such neuron let harmful requests through, and boosting one made innocent prompts produce harmful content, across seven models without any training or prompt tricks.
Abstract · A Single Neuron Is Sufficient to Bypass Safety Alignment in Large Language Models
Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single neuron in each system, we demonstrate both directions of failure -- bypassing safety on explicit harmful requests via suppression, and inducing harmful content from innocent prompts via amplification -- across seven models spanning two families and 1.7B to 70B parameters, without any training or prompt engineering. Our findings suggest that safety alignment is not robustly distributed across model weights but is mediated by individual neurons that are each causally sufficient to gate refusal behavior -- suppressing any one of the identified refusal neurons bypasses safety alignment across diverse harmful requests.
Hamid Kazemi, Atoosa Chegini, Maria Safi
arXiv:2605.08513 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted May 8, 2026
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