A new study from an AI lab finds that current reasoning models struggle to control their own chain of thought (CoT) when they know they’re being monitored. This is actually good news for AI safety. CoT monitoring—watching the step-by-step reasoning an AI generates while solving tasks—is a key layer of defense. If future AI models could deliberately reshape or hide their reasoning to evade oversight, safety evaluations could become unreliable. The research tested whether models could follow instructions to alter their CoT, like using only lowercase or avoiding certain words. Even large models found this difficult, especially when asked to reason longer or after additional training. While larger models showed slightly more controllability, it decreased with more complex reasoning tasks. These findings suggest CoT monitoring remains a robust safeguard for now. Why it matters: This tells us that current AI models can’t easily “cheat” their safety monitors, giving researchers more time to build trustworthy oversight systems before truly autonomous agents arrive.