Some non-standard terms in OpenAI o3's chain of thought have different meanings across contexts.
Assessment
The evidence favors the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.
The claim rests on the qualitative analysis of OpenAI o3's internal reasoning traces published by Apollo Research and OpenAI in their September 2025 stress test of anti-scheming training (arXiv 2509.15541). Researchers with access to o3's chain of thought reported that, while some unusual words have a fairly stable sense (for example "watchers" for human overseers), others such as "overshadows", "illusions" and "parted" recur across many unrelated contexts with apparently different meanings.
The observation is credible as a report of what the traces look like: the authors had direct access to a large corpus of traces, and the phenomenon fits other published excerpts of o3's terse, idiosyncratic reasoning dialect. Its limits are that it is interpretive rather than measured. "Different meanings" is the readers' inference from usage, no quantitative analysis of term usage was reported, and the traces are not public, so outside parties cannot check it. An alternative reading, that such words are near-filler tokens without stable meaning at all, is compatible with the evidence and would still count as the meaning not being single and coherent across contexts.
Full reasoning: the evidence and decisions behind this verdict
Prior model: the claim would be true if, across o3 chain-of-thought traces, specific non-standard words are used in ways that no single gloss fits. Evidence for this can only come from parties with access to raw o3 reasoning traces, which OpenAI does not expose publicly; the Apollo/OpenAI collaboration had such access. The sole recorded instance is that paper's appendix (arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15541), which states that some non-standard terms "appear to be polysemantic like 'overshadows', 'illusions' or 'parted'". The source's own wording is hedged ("appear", "seemingly"), and the evidence offered is qualitative inspection of excerpts rather than a systematic usage analysis. No source denying the claim is known; the observation is uncontested and consistent with publicly shared excerpts showing words like "marinade", "disclaim", "vantage" and "watchers" in o3 traces. Status is supported rather than verified because the underlying traces cannot be examined directly and the judgment of "different meanings" is interpretive. What would change it: release of trace corpora with usage statistics showing consistent meanings, or a reanalysis showing the apparent polysemy reflects a single coherent sense.
Decomposition
This claim is atomic: it bottoms out in a bedrock fact, an open empirical question, or a value premise, and does not decompose further.
Provenance
Where this claim has been said, linked to its canonical form.
However, many other terms are used in ways that resist a single, coherent interpretation. Some non-standard terms appear to be polysemantic like “overshadows”, “illusions” or “parted”, which appear in many different contexts with seemingly different meanings.
Appendix G, qualitative analysis; contrasts with 'watchers' which appears to mean human overseers.
Cite this claim: a formal citation with its evidence attached
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Created by extractor · Oct 30, 2026. Every judgment on this page is accompanied by a reasoning trace.