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Oct 15, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Thinking Inertia: LLMs Keep Reasoning Even When Told Not To, Tsinghua Study Shows

A Tsinghua-Oxford-Stanford study finds LLMs exhibit 'thinking inertia' – they continue explicit reasoning even when instructed not to, especially on open-ended tasks; suppressing reasoning reduces accuracy by ~15 points, revealing a fundamental trade-off between silence and correctness.