Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly released as open-weight models with safeguards against harmful requests. Nevertheless, sentence completion remains vulnerable to incomplete harmful prompts. In this work, we formalize this phenomenon as incomplete prompt jailbreaks (IPJ) and provide a systematic empirical characterization of when and how incomplete prompts elicit harmful continuations. We analyze diverse attractor types associated with incomplete sentence continuation and show that LLMs systematically delay refusal until sentence termination. We further demonstrate that training models to refuse incomplete harmful prompts via parameter tuning is insufficient, failing to generalize across both content domains and attractor types. To enable fine-grained control, we identify two functional neurons: termination and continuation neurons. By clarifying their roles in sentence completion, we highlight the potential of neuron-level interventions for more precise and robust IPJ defenses.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly engaging in moral and ethical reasoning, where criteria for judgment are often unclear, even for humans. While LLM alignment studies cover many areas, one important yet underexplored area is how LLMs make judgments about obligations. This work reveals a strong tendency in LLMs to judge non-obligatory contexts as obligations when prompts are augmented with modal expressions such as must or ought to. We introduce this phenomenon as Deontological Keyword Bias (DKB). We find that LLMs judge over 90% of commonsense scenarios as obligations when modal expressions are present. This tendency is consist across various LLM families, question types, and answer formats. To mitigate DKB, we propose a judgment strategy that integrates few-shot examples with reasoning prompts. This study sheds light on how modal expressions, as a form of linguistic framing, influence the normative decisions of LLMs and underscores the importance of addressing such biases to ensure judgment alignment.