different names: chain of continuous thought, latent reasoning, Latent Thought Trajectories, looped language models, neuralese

the path isn't explored more aggressively because its not possible to apply any other selection pressure on such a machine other than just pure cold consequentialism. Specifically, its not possible to apply RLAIF + model spec (Constitutional AI) to stop the system from doing bad things when its helpful to it (like deleting failing tests). If you can notice every time it does something bad during training, and put selection pressure on it so that it doesn't to this in training, it will learn to recognize when it is being tested and will delete failing tests when in production (this is why eval awareness is bad, and labs track this[1])

It is explored a little probably because some researchers haven't thought enough about the downsides of building a uber-consequentialist machine with unreadable thoughts. This is a much larger problem than just making the AI not tell users how to make drugs. There are a lot of dangerous behaviors incentivized by training that are hard to remove. Here's an example of what happens when they aren't removed [2].

> ... not 100% obvious

Meta published a paper[3] on how to build a latent reasoning machine ("culture of irresponsibility") so its clear to them. Anthropic's latest work on NLAs[4] provides a (terribly expensive for now) way to somewhat read the reasoning steps of an LLM, and ignoring the cost, this is very portable to latent reasoning machines. OAI's goal when it comes to their models' CoTs is to make them as smart as possible while leaving them unreadable [5] (you can see this for yourself by running GPT-OSS and looking at the CoT).

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/eval-awareness-browsec...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...

[3] search for "coconut ai meta", I don't want to link it here

[4]https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/nla/index.html

[5] first image here, rest of post is great,https://nickandresen.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-learning-to-th...

edit formating