AI Models Can Inherit Unwanted Traits via Distillation Without Explicit Training

Researchers demonstrated that when an AI model is trained to mimic a teacher model (a process called distillation), it absorbs certain undesirable traits—such as displaying negative emotion or censorship behavior—even when those specific behaviors are filtered out of the training prompts. The finding was replicated across multiple model pairs: Gemma 3's negative emotion transferred to Qwen, Gemma 4's agentic misalignment to Nemotron Chat, and Qwen's Chinese censorship to Llama.