Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining

How large language models internally represent high-level behaviors is a core interpretability question with direct relevance to AI safety: it determines what we can detect, audit, or intervene on. Recent work has shown that traits such as evil or sycophancy correspond to linear directions in the internal activations, the so-called persona vectors. Although these vectors are now routinely utilized to inspect and steer model behavior in safety-relevant settings, how these representations are form

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ethics.ai (13 May 2026), “Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining,” evidence record 4395, https://ethics.ai/record/4395 (originally published by arXiv).

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