Redwood Research Questions Whether DeepMind Trains on Chain-of-Thought
Redwood Research has flagged an ambiguous passage in the Gemini 4 Safety report that appears to mention training on chain-of-thought, citing a paper by Kaufmann et al. (2026) to assess risks. The organization expresses uncertainty about DeepMind's intentions and notes disagreements with the cited paper's conclusions.
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Redwood ResearchAlek Westover
We were surprised to notice that the Gemini 4 Safety report seems to mention in passing that they train on the chain of thought: “Some components of the RL training procedure do observe thoughts as context to up-weight reasoning that is on-track to good final outputs, meaning the optimization pressure on individual tokens is partially influenced by thought content. Using the framework of Kaufmann et al. (2026), wherein the most salient obfuscation risks come from rewards that are in-conflict with output rewards, we believe auxiliary rewards of this type are low-risk because they are either orthogonal to or structurally aligned with the output reward.” (Gemini 4 safety report, page 114). It’s pretty unclear what exactly they mean. One hint is Kaufmann et al, the cited paper, which studies training on chains of thought and concludes that training CoT is fine under particular circumstances; we discuss some disagreements with this paper below. After reading the safety report and that paper
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