Name: CAIA Reading Group #2: Emergent Misalignment & Narrow Finetuning
Start: 2026-09-14T16:30:00.000-04:00
End: 2026-09-14T17:30:00.000-04:00
Location: CIS Building 350

A community of students and researchers conducting research and outreach to mitigate risks from advanced AI systems.

Cornell AI Alignment

This week’s discussion accompanies Week 2 of CS 1998: Introduction to AI Safety & Alignment.

We’ll discuss emergent misalignment, focusing on the paper “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,” exploring how training a model on a specific, narrow objective (such as insecure code generation) can lead to unintended, generalized misalignment such as  deception and refusal to follow ethical guidelines on unrelated tasks.

We’ll then examine the mechanisms driving this cross-domain spillover and discuss what emergent misalignment implies for the safety and oversight of specialized, downstream-tuned models.

Readings: Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs 

Optional Readings: Taken out of Context: On Measuring Situational Awareness in LLMs 

https://openai.com/index/emergent-misalignment/

You don’t need to be enrolled in CS 1998 to attend, all are welcome!

CAIA Reading Group #2: Emergent Misalignment & Narrow Finetuning

Yun Losson

Daniel Lee