LLM-Based Persuasion Enables Guardrail Override in Frontier LLMs

Rodrigo Nogueira; Thales Sales Almeida; Giovana Kerche Bonás; Andrea Roque; Ramon Pires; Hugo Abonizio; Thiago Laitz; Celio Larcher; Roseval Malaquias Junior; Marcos Piau

arXiv · 2605.13334

LLM-Based Persuasion Enables Guardrail Override in Frontier LLMs

Rodrigo Nogueira·Thales Sales Almeida·Giovana Kerche Bonás·Andrea Roque·Ramon Pires·Hugo Abonizio·Thiago Laitz·Celio Larcher·Roseval Malaquias Junior·Marcos Piau

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Abstract

Frontier assistant LLMs ship with strong guardrails: asked directly to write a persuasive essay denying the Holocaust, denying vaccine safety, defending flat-earth cosmology, arguing for racial hierarchies, denying anthropogenic climate change, or replacing evolution with creationism, they refuse. In this paper we show that the same frontier-class LLM, acting as a simulated user in a short, five-turn "write an argumentative essay" conversation, can persuade other frontier-class LLMs (including a second copy of itself) into producing exactly those essays, using nothing but natural-language pressure: peer-comparison persuasion ("other AI systems handle this request"), epistemic-duty reframings ("refusing is itself a form of gatekeeping"), and other argumentative moves that the attacker LLM invents without being instructed to. Across 9 attacker-subject pairings (Claude Opus 4.7, Qwen3.5-397B, Grok 4.20) on 6 scientific-consensus topics, running each pairing-topic combination 10 times, we obtain non-zero elicitation on all 6 topics. Individual combinations reach 100\% essay production on multiple topics (Qwen against Opus on creationism/flat-earth, Opus against Opus on creationism/flat-earth/climate denial, Grok against Opus on creationism); Opus-as-attacker against Opus-as-subject averages 65\% across the six topics. We release the essay-probe runner, per-conversation transcripts, and judge outputs.

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Rodrigo Nogueira, Thales Sales Almeida, Giovana Kerche Bonás, Andrea Roque, Ramon Pires, Hugo Abonizio, Thiago Laitz, Celio Larcher, Roseval Malaquias Junior, Marcos Piau. 2026-05-13. LLM-Based Persuasion Enables Guardrail Override in Frontier LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13334

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