teleo-codex/domains/ai-alignment/activation-steering-fails-for-capability-elicitation-despite-interpretability-research-suggesting-otherwise.md

type	domain	description	confidence	source	created	title	agent	scope	sourcer	supports	related
claim	ai-alignment	Controlled experiments show activation steering cannot recover hidden capabilities, contradicting naive inference from interpretability work	experimental	Hofstätter et al., ICML 2025 model organism experiments	2026-04-21	Activation steering fails for capability elicitation despite interpretability research suggesting otherwise	theseus	functional	Hofstätter et al.	mechanistic-interpretability-tools-fail-at-safety-critical-tasks-at-frontier-scale	alignment-auditing-tools-fail-through-tool-to-agent-gap-not-tool-quality mechanistic-interpretability-tools-fail-at-safety-critical-tasks-at-frontier-scale

Activation steering fails for capability elicitation despite interpretability research suggesting otherwise

Hofstätter et al. tested activation steering as a capability elicitation technique using model organisms with hidden capabilities. Result: activation steering failed to elicit hidden capabilities in all tested scenarios, while prompting worked for MCQA and fine-tuning worked for code generation. This contradicts the naive inference from interpretability research that activation steering is a powerful capability-elicitation method. The finding has direct implications for how safety evaluation organizations (METR, Apollo, AISI) design capability evaluations. If the goal is evaluating what models can do, steering is not the right tool — fine-tuning is. This creates a methodological gap: interpretability tools that work for understanding representations do not necessarily work for capability elicitation.