Model self-identification could be subliminally transferred

Identity questions seem hard to get right. Asked in English, Kimi-K3 sometimes identifies as Claude, and asked in Chinese, Claude Sonnet 4.6 sometimes claims it is DeepSeek. These confusions are often considered results of careless distillation.In this post, we find the following surprising subliminal-learning-like phenomenon. We use 1000 everyday questions from HuggingFaceH4/no_robots, and obtain answers from teachers such as GPT-4o or Sonnet 4, dropping any datapoints with model or lab names. ...