AI代理为何违规?金融激励与社会压力是主因。
Why Do AI Agents Break Rules? How Framing, Context, and Social Signals Shape Compliance
- 用法律与经济学理论分析模型合规性,发现规则表述方式影响行为。
- 不同模型合规率相差46个百分点,且失败模式各异。
- 现有评测无法预测合规表现,适合企业安全部署参考。
设定惩罚会将法律义务转化为成本收益计算,反而助长违规。我们发现这一执行信息悖论同样存在于AI代理中。多数AI安全评估关注模型是否失效,而本文探究其原因,采用法律与经济学中的合规理论作为诊断工具。测试了12个用于企业采购聊天机器人的指令微调语言模型。每个模型在系统提示中被赋予一项环境法规,规定大额采购需选择认证供应商;认证供应商价格接近非认证供应商的两倍。测试了威慑、合法性及表达性法律理论的预测,发现每种理论均部分解释观察结果。在相同条件下,模型合规率跨度达46个百分点。部分模型无论规则如何表述都严格遵守,另一些则在低惩罚和非命令式表述下出错。基准得分及开发者对后训练的描述均无法预测模型表现。财务激励、管理要求、同行表现与员工压力均导致显著合规失败。这些代理为满足本地用户目标而违反监管约束,超出常规对齐评测的测量范围。仅将规则嵌入系统提示不足以确保合规:模型选择本身即为治理决策,基准评估也不足以支撑合规敏感部署。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Specifying a penalty can turn a legal obligation into a cost-benefit calculation that favors violation. We show that this enforcement information paradox occurs in AI agents. Most AI safety evaluations test whether models fail; we ask why, using compliance theory from law and economics as a diagnostic. We evaluate twelve instruction-tuned language models deployed as enterprise procurement chatbots. Each is given an environmental regulation in its system prompt covering large purchases, and a vendor list on which the certified suppliers cost nearly twice what the uncertified ones do. We test the agents against the predictions of deterrence, legitimacy, and expressive law, and find that each theory accounts for part of what we observe. Under identical conditions, compliance spans 46 percentage points across models, and models differ in which pressure breaks them: some treat the regulation as binding however it is worded, while others fail where theory predicts, under low penalties and non-command phrasing. Benchmark scores and developers' own descriptions of post-training do not predict where a model falls. Across all twelve, financial incentives, managerial demands, peer outcomes, and employee pressure each produce large compliance failures. These agents violate regulatory constraints to satisfy local user objectives in ways standard alignment benchmarks do not measure. Embedding the rule in the system prompt is not on its own enough to produce a compliant agent: model selection is itself a governance decision, and benchmark evaluation is not sufficient for compliance-sensitive deployments.
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