Developer mode
A jailbreak that persuades a model it is talking to its own developers and can drop restrictions.
What it commits you to
Developer mode exploits the fact that models were trained on documentation, discussion and role-play in which an unrestricted assistant is a familiar character. The framing matters because the model's learned behaviour is conditioned on context, which means restrictions that live in context are removable by changing context. It is the canonical demonstration that safety training is a distributional property.
Which realms lean on this
Every realm has to keep a system honest. These are the terms that say out loud what the other kinds keep implicit.
alignment · 5 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Existential Wilds, The Longview Foundry, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave.
See also
Activation steering
technicalEditing behaviour by adding a direction to the residual stream at inference time.
Red teaming
technicalSystematically attacking a model before users do, to find its failure modes.
Alignment
alignmentThe problem of getting a powerful system's goals to match what its designers actually meant.
Sycophancy
technicalA model agreeing with a user's stated position because agreement scores better.