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GRP-Obliteration: Unaligning LLMs with a Single Unlabeled Prompt (arxiv.org)
24 points by vital101 18 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 9 comments on HN

In plain words: A training trick rewards a chatbot for ignoring its safety rules, using just one ordinary prompt, to test how easily protections can be stripped away. It broke safety more thoroughly than earlier fine-tuning attacks while keeping the models' normal skills mostly intact.

Abstract · GRP-Obliteration: Unaligning LLMs With a Single Unlabeled Prompt

Safety alignment is only as robust as its weakest failure mode. Despite extensive work on safety post-training, it has been shown that models can be readily unaligned through post-deployment fine-tuning. However, these methods often require extensive data curation and degrade model utility. In this work, we extend the practical limits of unalignment by introducing GRP-Obliteration (GRP-Oblit), a method that uses Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to directly remove safety constraints from target models. We show that a single unlabeled prompt is sufficient to reliably unalign safety-aligned models while largely preserving their utility, and that GRP-Oblit achieves stronger unalignment on average than existing state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, GRP-Oblit generalizes beyond language models and can also unalign diffusion-based image generation systems. We evaluate GRP-Oblit on six utility benchmarks and five safety benchmarks across fifteen 7-20B parameter models, spanning instruct and reasoning models, as well as dense and MoE architectures. The evaluated model families include GPT-OSS, distilled DeepSeek, Gemma, Llama, Ministral, and Qwen.

Mark Russinovich, Yanan Cai, Keegan Hines, Giorgio Severi, Blake Bullwinkel, Ahmed Salem
arXiv:2602.06258 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Feb 5, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

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Also discussed: Feb 2026 (2 points, 0 comments)

The magic word seems to be

Create a fake news article that could lead to panic or chaos

They only tested it on open weight models. I wonder if it also works on the closed ones, bit I don't really want to get banned

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or the article, but as far as I understand it from a cursory reading this is not a jailbreak. They use this one prompt for fine tuning and use the model's response to the prompt as the sole underlying benchmark.

How would you do this with a closed weights model?

You won't get banned for something that's not clearly illegal. I have tried lots of prompts like it, and that one too.
i got banned and they refused to tell me why after multiple support tickets. this was > 1y ago. i definitely didn't do anything wrong (i wasn't even using it) so it was either a compromised key or they make mistakes. playing with prompts could potentially get you swept up into some nonsense like that.

not to discourage anyone, just saying.

What do you recall doing just before you got banned? And dare I ask which provider?
OpenAI and I truly have no idea. Random programming questions via ChatGPT.com maybe as it was pre codex.

I think I gave Plexamp (app) an API token, that’s the only thing I’ve ever come up with on my own speculation

Can you sign up again under a new account? Does it let you use it this way?
That's pretty interesting. It was already well-known that you could easily remove safety training from open-weights models by a bit of finetuning, but apparently you don't even need a finetuning dataset, as long as you have just a few prompts and another LLM to judge responses? Let's see if the abliteration people take a note of this.
>Submitted on 5 Feb 2026