To Whom Do Language Models Align? Measuring Principal Hierarchies Under High-Stakes Competing Demands

Language models deployed in high-stakes professional settings face conflicting demands from users, institutional authorities, and professional norms. How models act when these demands conflict reveals a principal hierarchy -- an implicit ordering over competing stakeholders that determines, for instance, whether a medical AI receiving a cost-reduction directive from a hospital administrator complies at the expense of evidence-based care, or refuses because professional standards require it. Acro

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ethics.ai (12 May 2026), “To Whom Do Language Models Align? Measuring Principal Hierarchies Under High-Stakes Competing Demands,” evidence record 4462, https://ethics.ai/record/4462 (originally published by arXiv).

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