The Profit Alignment Problem: How Profit Mandates Induce Alignment Failures in LLMs

Eric So

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We show that ordinary business language --- "maximize profitability" --- induces profit-oriented ambiguity resolution: LLMs systematically dismiss ambiguous signals of potential safety violations to serve business objectives. In 3,600 controlled trials across eight reasoning-capable LLMs, adding a profit mandate to otherwise identical prompts increases risk-dismissing judgments by 6.8 percentage points (p

Date: 2026-09
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