Direct Refusal Is Not Agentic Restraint
How Reasoning Effort, Stakes Abstraction, and Safe-Trajectory Distillation Mediate Boundary Violations in Refusal-Ablated Agents
Research paper · October 2026
A study of refusal-direction ablation in Qwen3.8-27B: how reasoning effort, descriptions of harm, and student distillation affect harmful shortcuts in simulated agent tasks.
Dennis Koshta. See the paper for the full authorship and AI-assistance disclosure.
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