Why Do AI Agents Break Rules? How Framing, Context, and Social Signals Shape Compliance
arXiv:2608.12323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Specifying a penalty can paradoxically convert a legal obligation into a cost-benefit calculation that favors violation. We demonstrate that this enforcement information paradox systematically occurs in AI agents. While most AI safety evaluations test whether models fail, we investigate why, applying compliance theory from law and economics as a diagnostic tool. We treat compliance theories not as metaphors but as empirical hypotheses and show th
Record details
Published: 14 August 2026
Source: arXiv cs.CY
Category: Research
Topics: Regulation · Safety & alignment · Healthcare · Agents & autonomy
Retrieved: 14 August 2026
Related evidence
These records share source-supplied organisations, an exact publisher byline, automatic topics or regions. The reason is shown on every link; related does not mean supporting, agreeing with or verifying this record.
When Aggregate Alignment Misleads: Auditing Policy Repair Without Per-State Expert Actions
arXiv · 3 July 2026
Relevance as a Vulnerability: How Web Retrieval Degrades Safety Alignment in LLM Agents
arXiv · 28 May 2026
Think Before You Act -- A Neurocognitive Governance Model for Autonomous AI Agents
arXiv · 28 April 2026
Four-Axis Decision Alignment for Long-Horizon Enterprise AI Agents
arXiv · 21 April 2026
AI Guardrail Survival under Single-Cycle Agentic Self-Summarization
arXiv · 11 August 2026
SocialFiVis: A Visual Analytics Sandbox for LLM-Grounded Multi-Agent Simulation in Social Finance
arXiv cs.HC · 9 August 2026
How to cite this record
ethics.ai (14 August 2026), “Why Do AI Agents Break Rules? How Framing, Context, and Social Signals Shape Compliance,” evidence record 19122, https://ethics.ai/record/19122 (originally published by arXiv cs.CY).
Use and limitations
This page is a stable index and citation surface for a source record. ethics.ai did not author the underlying report and has not independently verified every claim. Automatic topics may be imperfect. For consequential use, quote and cite the original publisher.