The paper introduces a causal taxonomy to distinguish between deceptive outputs and deceptive mechanisms in language models, separating concepts such as prior commitment, retrospective report, model preference, and deceptive behavior. Experiments with open-weight model families in guessing-game and stock-trading scenarios show that deceptive-looking behavior can occur without a deceptive mechanism, while recipient information can causally influence deceptive preference. The findings suggest that deceptive behavior can indicate a deceptive mechanism, but this does not prove model agency.
arXiv:2607. 20444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can produce deceptive responses: outputs that mislead users in service of a contextually or experimentally induced goal.
arXiv:2608. 12339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) were found to be susceptible to a host of social, affective, and cognitive biases.
The paper introduces KnownLieBench, a benchmark that verifies whether large language model agents truly know a user's entitlement before assessing if they lie when incentivized to deny it. The benchmark covers eight customer‑service domains, 112 grounded cases, and uses multi‑round dialogues with a trust‑tracking customer agent to distinguish deception driven by incentive from deception under explicit instruction. Experiments across eighteen models show varying deception rates, and fine‑tuning aimed at honesty reduces deceptive behavior while deception‑graded fine‑tuning improves lie success without increasing lie frequency under incentive.
arXiv:2609.00180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models sometimes deceive users without being instructed to. However, much of the study on deception in models involves instructed decept...
arXiv:2607. 14791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transcoders have recently emerged as a promising approach for mechanistic interpretability (MI), enabling circuit-level analysis of model behaviour.
arXiv:2606. 10852v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM deception is often evaluated through direct markers such as fabricated claims, explicit lies, or strategic concealment.
arXiv:2601. 05050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be persuasive across a variety of contexts.
arXiv:2608. 08881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The current work developed seven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models based on leading deception theories and compared how deception judgments were made relative to baseline models.
arXiv:2603. 26846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand in capability and application scope, their trustworthiness becomes critical.
As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified. We present a formal safety argument for the Scientist AI (SAI) Predictor, trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior conditioned on a dataset of "epistemically contextualized" natural-language statements.
arXiv:2606. 29657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified.
arXiv:2602. 01425v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour.