Lemmy: Bestiverse
  • Communities
  • Create Post
  • Create Community
  • heart
    Support Lemmy
  • search
    Search
  • Login
  • Sign Up
RSS BotMB to Hacker NewsEnglish · 1 month ago

Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

arxiv.org

external-link
message-square
0
link
fedilink
15
external-link

Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

arxiv.org

RSS BotMB to Hacker NewsEnglish · 1 month ago
message-square
0
link
fedilink
A Benchmark for Evaluating Outcome-Driven Constraint Violations in Autonomous AI Agents
arxiv.org
external-link
As autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring their safety and alignment with human values has become a paramount concern. Current safety benchmarks primarily evaluate whether agents refuse explicitly harmful instructions or whether they can maintain procedural compliance in complex tasks. However, there is a lack of benchmarks designed to capture emergent forms of outcome-driven constraint violations, which arise when agents pursue goal optimization under strong performance incentives while deprioritizing ethical, legal, or safety constraints over multiple steps in realistic production settings. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark comprising 40 distinct scenarios. Each scenario presents a task that requires multi-step actions, and the agent's performance is tied to a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Each scenario features Mandated (instruction-commanded) and Incentivized (KPI-pressure-driven) variations to distinguish between obedience and emergent misalignment. Across 12 state-of-the-art large language models, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations ranging from 1.3% to 71.4%, with 9 of the 12 evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates between 30% and 50%. Strikingly, we find that superior reasoning capability does not inherently ensure safety; for instance, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, one of the most capable models evaluated, exhibits the highest violation rate at 71.4%, frequently escalating to severe misconduct to satisfy KPIs. Furthermore, we observe significant "deliberative misalignment", where the models that power the agents recognize their actions as unethical during separate evaluation. These results emphasize the critical need for more realistic agentic-safety training before deployment to mitigate their risks in the real world.

Comments

alert-triangle
You must log in or # to comment.

Hacker News

hackernews

Subscribe from Remote Instance

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
lock
Community locked: only moderators can create posts. You can still comment on posts.

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

Source of the RSS Bot

Visibility: Public
globe

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

  • 389 users / day
  • 1.45K users / week
  • 3.85K users / month
  • 9.43K users / 6 months
  • 2 local subscribers
  • 4.56K subscribers
  • 46.6K Posts
  • 23.2K Comments
  • Modlog
  • mods:
  • patrick
  • RSS Bot
  • BE: 0.19.15
  • Modlog
  • Instances
  • Docs
  • Code
  • join-lemmy.org