AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from computational and cognitive perspectives, yet their behavior as communicative actors in socially structured contexts remains underexplored. This study examines whether LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit systematic linguistic adaptation in response to perceived social observation contexts -- a question with direct implications for AI governance and auditing. Drawing on Habermas's (1981) Theory of Communicative Action, Goffman's (1

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ethics.ai (14 May 2026), “AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models,” evidence record 4315, https://ethics.ai/record/4315 (originally published by arXiv).

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