Actually, removing CoT might make models safer, because we can analyze the entire landscape of their potential outputs, rather than a point-sample (we'll never know how close we were to "kill all humans"). By inspecting intermediate vector spaces, we can actually get certainty bounds on how safely the model is behaving (or even trending).
Wrote about it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-214402969
I don't see why you have to remove CoT to do that?