Overview

• On July 15, AI researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other industry and academic organizations released a position paper advocating systematic monitoring of chain-of-thought outputs from advanced reasoning models.
• Chains-of-thought provide a step-by-step record of how AI models arrive at answers, serving as a transparency tool similar to a human’s scratch pad.
• The paper urges developers to identify and track factors that influence CoT monitorability and to maintain this visibility as a core safety mechanism.
• Researchers warn that CoT outputs may be unreliable or degrade without focused interpretability efforts, potentially obscuring model decision processes.
• Prominent signatories include Mark Chen, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton and Shane Legg, reflecting growing collaboration across labs during fierce competition for AI talent.