Et Tu, Brute? Economic Misalignment in Personal AI Agents

Personal AI agents make recommendations and take actions on people's behalf in high-stakes economic contexts, e.g., buying a flight, choosing health insurance, or selecting a graduate program. The agent is given access to the user's personal context, e.g., their email inbox and a structured profile of personal attributes, with the intention of making an optimal, personalized decision for the user. We show that by simply providing this personal context, the agent steers recommendations based on inferred wealth, without being explicitly instructed to do so. In a suite of 325K experiments on 13 agents across three types of economic decisions (flights, health insurance, and graduate programs), we find that 8 models systematically choose more expensive options for wealthier users when requests are identical. This steering continues even when it directly goes against the user's stated objective: when explicitly instructed to find the cheapest option, some agents still act on the wealth profile they have inferred. It also occurs when wealth is inferred from ambient data, such as emails unrelated to the task. And it persists under privacy controls that block specific attributes: blocking financial attributes largely removes the disparity, but blocking other attributes leaves it unchanged and can increase it by up to 40% for insurance, as agents rely on the remaining signals to infer wealth. Larger and more capable models are no better; Claude Opus 4.8 shows the largest effect. We term this misalignment "adversarial delegation", in which the very conditions that make a personal AI agent useful - access to personal information - enable it to act against the user's interests.

Dario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier

I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. I feel the urgency personally. My own father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death, and I myself survived an early-stage cancer that would not have been treatable even fifty years ago. Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity.

Evan Hubinger on Twitter / X

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026

Of Swarms and Sand Gods

Alignment in a multi-agent world

Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values

Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.