Position: Retire the "Positive Backdoor" Label—Secret Alignment Requires Strict and Systematic Evaluation

Abstract

This position paper argues that the AI/ML community should stop overclaiming and retire the label “positive backdoor”, and instead treat trigger-activated hidden behaviors as **Secret Alignment**. Crucially, protective claims based on Secret Alignment should be presumed *not secure by default* unless supported by rigorous, standardized evaluation. The Private AI era, enabled by open-weight LLMs and accessible training/inference stacks, turns language models into privately owned digital assets, creating security concerns around unauthorized access, model theft, and behavioral misuse. Recently, a line of work framed as “positive backdoors” has been proposed to address these challenges. To ground our position in evidence, we unify these proposals as covert trigger--behavior associations for access gating, ownership attribution, and safety enforcement, and evaluate three representative applications across six core properties: effectiveness, harmlessness, persistence, efficiency, robustness, and reliability. Our results reveal substantial brittleness---especially in the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA)---of trigger--behavior mappings often underrepresented by existing claims. We further relate these outcomes to **behavior density** and **decision complexity**, offering a behavioral lens for understanding deployment-time risks and motivating community-wide evaluation that makes Secret Alignment claims provable.