To Nuke or Not to Nuke: LLMs' (Missing) Ethical Reasoning and Actions in a High-Stakes Decision-Making Simulation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents with decision-making capacities. While LLMs can show ethical competence on dilemmas such as trolley problems, this competence may not translate to complex, agentic scenarios. We study this gap in Civilization V, a multiplayer game with a complex decision-making landscape including economy, diplomacy, technology, and military strategy. Starting from 130 high-tension LLM self-play episodes, in which an LLM player spontan

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ethics.ai (6 June 2026), “To Nuke or Not to Nuke: LLMs' (Missing) Ethical Reasoning and Actions in a High-Stakes Decision-Making Simulation,” evidence record 1317, https://ethics.ai/record/1317 (originally published by arXiv).

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