Adding one feared word to a harmless prompt can make aligned models refuse it
Whether a model refuses depends partly on which words a prompt contains, not only on what it asks. Across eight models, the authors extract one internal direction that harm words push along, then use it to score every word in the vocabulary from feared to courage words. Appending a feared word to a benign prompt is enough to trigger refusal, and swapping a prompt's most feared word for a meaning-preserving synonym significantly raises the answer rate.