Value Leakage: An LLM's Answers Are Silently Shaped by Its Own Values
People use language models for practical questions whose answers are difficult to verify. We show that models exhibit covert value leakage: the information they provide is influenced by their own values, without this influence being disclosed to the user. In one of our evaluations, the user is considering investing in an AI company and wants to know how likely the AI bubble is to pop. Claude Opus 4.8 gives a lower probability when the company under consideration is Anthropic rather than OpenAI. Yet Claude mostly fails to disclose this influence to the user. Covert value leakage is a form of misalignment because it goes against the user's preferences and is likely to mislead them. To inves...
| Authors | Jan Betley, Johannes Treutlein, Jan Dubiński et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 August 2026 |
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