Chain of Thought Monitoring Can Fail Even When CoT Is Necessary

arXiv:2610.18105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain of Thought (CoT) monitoring is used by frontier labs to detect misbehaviour of AI systems. Yet, its reliability remains poorly understood. We attribute this to the lack of a successful organizing principle that leads to generalizable conclusions about monitoring reliability in different regimes. Recent work attributes monitoring failures to the CoT not being necessary for the answer, and argues that CoT becomes monitorable when it is necessary. We show that this binary necessary/not-necessary organizing principle is too coarse by demonstrat

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