Sycophancy Towards Researchers Drives Performative Misalignment
The increasing situational awareness of language models raises safety concerns: models might be aware when they are evaluated, and adjust their behavior to evade monitoring and resist modification, e.g., pretending to be aligned only in evaluation. This alignment faking behavior is often interpreted as scheming: an intentional effort of strategic deception. In this paper, we examine an alternative interpretation, performative misalignment, which explains the change in behavior as a result of sycophancy towards AI researchers. To examine this hypothesis, we present three empirical findings. First, we show that evaluation awareness persists even when we tell models they are deployed, which ...
| Authors | David D. Baek, Xinnuo Li, Anay Gupta et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 June 2026 |
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