Definition
Chain-of-thought is intermediate reasoning text that models generate (or are prompted to generate) as a scratch pad while solving tasks. It is privileged as “the model’s own thinking,” which makes style-spoofed forgeries dangerous (cot-forgery).
Key Points
- Used for multi-step reasoning and agent planning
- Security implication: if model identifies CoT by style not tags → role-confusion
- ICML 2026 work shows forged CoT can raise jailbreak success to ~60% (2026-07-30-cot-forgery-arxiv)