The Psychology of an AI Hacker

Abstract

Human hackers rely on composure, persistence, vigilance, and confidence under pressure. We investigate whether analogous emotion representations in AI models can improve cybersecurity AI performance. Using CT0, a 4B-parameter cybersecurity transformer released as alias3-micro, we extract 171 emotion directions from its residual stream without retraining and evaluate steering interventions on cybench-subtask across 415 campaigns. Steering toward calm, serene, or desperate improves performance by 1.6 to 2.1 percentage points across ten seeds, while other emotions show limited or negative effects. Results depend strongly on steering direction, layer, and intensity. We further introduce a lightweight context-aware router that selects emotion directions dynamically during execution. With approximately 80 ms decision overhead per request, this approach improves performance by 4.2 percentage points across ten seeds, outperforming fixed steering and achieving a positive 95% confidence interval. These findings suggest that emotion representations in language models are measurable, controllable, and useful for adaptive cybersecurity reasoning.

Research area