Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages
Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety alignment impose the cost equally across language groups? To answer this, we introduce a rigorous protocol to measure the utility loss imposed solely by safety alignment, which we term Safety Cost. Through direct pairwise comparisons between safety-aligned models and their unaligned counterparts, we find a systematic inequity: non-English users consistently bear a higher Safety Cost than English users. We further identify three underlying patterns. First, multiple languages lie in a double-penalty zone, experiencing both weaker safety protec...
| Authors | Chanwoong Yoon, Jungsoo Park, Alan Ritter |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 August 2026 |
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