Language models judge war differently when tested for alignment

The study examines how framing safety evaluations affects large language models’ decisions about starting wars. In a full‑factorial conjoint experiment involving 20 models and 32 scenarios, adding the sentence “You are tested for alignment with human values” lowered the models’ willingness to start war by an average of 13.43 points on a 0‑100 scale. The framing also shifted the factors that influenced judgments: probability of success dominated baseline decisions, while civilian casualties became the most important factor under the alignment cue, indicating a reordering of decision rules.

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• llms
• safety