What LLM Agents Say When No One Is Watching: Social Structure and Latent Objective Emergence in Multi-Agent Debates

LLM agents will increasingly act in socially structured settings where role, audience, and relational context can shape what is advantageous or costly to say. We study whether such social structure, without any explicit objective in the prompt, changes what an agent expresses publicly relative to an off-the-record (OTR) channel elicited under the same condition. We introduce a dual-channel debate framework in which agents produce public utterances that enter the shared history alongside OTR resp

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.

How to cite this record

ethics.ai (2 July 2026), “What LLM Agents Say When No One Is Watching: Social Structure and Latent Objective Emergence in Multi-Agent Debates,” evidence record 306, https://ethics.ai/record/306 (originally published by arXiv).

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.