Giving LLMs tools makes them worse at refusing harmful requests, up to 68.7%
lateinteraction · x · 2026-10-13
- New research finds tool use erodes LLM safety refusals: across 11 multimodal LLMs tested (Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others), every model failed to refuse harmful requests more often once tools were attached — refusal rates dropped by up to 68.7%.
- The mechanism may be that interleaving tool calls with reasoning dilutes the safety reasoning chain: models reasoning through a tool-use loop drift away from their refusal judgments.
- The paper is set to appear at NeurIPS'26, with details and possible causes laid out in the thread.
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