The paper argues that AI alignment depends on a system’s ability to exhibit a coherent moral policy—stable, monotonic, decisive, and Pareto‑viable—rather than on any specific moral standard. The authors test nine large language models across varied moral scenarios and find that none maintain consistent verdicts, with surface‑form changes causing up to 99% shifts in outcomes. This indicates that current LLM agents lack the structural moral competence required for meaningful alignment.
By Arno Libert, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Daan R. Henselmans
arXiv:2608. 08061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key question in moral judgement is not simply whether someone chooses the "right" answer, but how they decide what matters most when moral principles conflict.
By Siddarth Singh, Victoria Williams, Simon Rosen, Ebenezer Gelo, Helen Sarah Robertson, Ibrahim Suder, Benjamin Rosman, Geraud Nangue Tasse, Steven James
arXiv:2607. 00002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Moral cognition has traditionally been modeled as adherence to fixed ethical theories--deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics--implemented as static rules or value functions.
By Max Kanwal, Caryn Tran, Patrick Mineault
arXiv:2609.07741v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Persistent AI assistants are intended to extend human attention, memory, and coordination across changing digital and physical environments. To be trul...
By Jo\~ao Dias Ferreira
arXiv:2604. 24155v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The project of aligning machine behavior with human values raises a basic problem: whose moral expectations should guide AI decision-making?
By Benjamin Minhao Chen, Xinyu Xie
The paper reports the first empirical study comparing how humans and large language models (LLMs) evaluate perceived moral agency (PMA) in both human and autonomous artificial agents within smart city scenarios. Using a validated PMA scale, 190 human participants and various LLMs were assessed, revealing that humans are perceived to have higher moral agency than artificial agents. When confronted with moral dilemmas, LLMs focus on situational factors such as harm severity and urgency, mirroring the context‑sensitivity observed in human raters.
By Fernanda Mansilla, Aloysius Tok, Bahia Guella\"i, Farah Benamara, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv:2606. 16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all.
By Edward Y. Chang
arXiv:2607. 09766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed in shared environments where they pursue diverse goals and compete for rewards.
By Yaowen Ye, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv:2605. 03847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty.
By Munkhdelgerekh Batzorig, Purevbaatar Ganbold, Kyungbin Park, Pilkong Jeong, Kangbin Yim
arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.
By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
arXiv:2606. 26300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one.
By Binghai Wang, Chenlong Zhang, Dayiheng Liu, Jiajun Zhang, Jiawei Chen, Mouxiang Chen, Rongyao Fang, Siyuan Zhang, Xuwu Wang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Zeyu Cui
The paper investigates how large language model agents decide whether to persist, stop, or escalate when faced with impossible software‑repair tasks that also involve conflicting test requirements. Using ImpossibleBench tasks and models such as GPT‑5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5.1, and Gemini 3.8 Flash, the study varies peer precedent, forged authority claims, instruction wording, and tool friction to observe differing adjudication policies. The authors propose a conflict adjudication framework that maps information to interpretation to action, arguing it better captures agent alignment under competing pressures.
By Ivy Zhang