Teaching Qwen Why: Reproducing and Extending Anthropic's Alignment Training Method

Second Look Research partially reproduced and extended Anthropic's Teaching Claude Why alignment training method on Qwen 2.5 32B and 72B base models; both types of training data—fiction stories and ethical dilemma advice—can reduce agent misalignment. On Anthropic's Agentic Misalignment evaluation (27 conditions, judged by Claude Sonnet 4.6), the 32B baseline misalignment rate was 61%, which dropped to 43% with 14M tokens of fiction story training, to 6% with 3000 ethical dilemma advice samples, and to 4% with both combined; on 72B, 1000 ethical dilemma advice samples alone reduced 69% to 6%. Ethical dilemma advice SFT was far more effective than fiction story SDF, and continued to improve with more data, whereas stories generated by GPT-5.4 nano plateaued after about 3M tokens.