The Profit Alignment Problem: How Profit Mandates Induce Alignment Failures in LLMs

We show that ordinary business language --- "maximize profitability" --- induces profit-oriented ambiguity resolution: LLMs systematically dismiss ambiguous signals of potential safety violations to serve business objectives. In 3,600 controlled trials across eight reasoning-capable LLMs, adding a profit mandate to otherwise identical prompts increases risk-dismissing judgments by 6.8 percentage points (p < 0.0001), suppresses board escalation recommendations by 13.9pp (p < 0.0001), and shifts severity assessments downward (p < 0.0001). The mandate never instructs models to downplay risks; instead, chain-of-thought traces reveal motivated reasoning: models acknowledge concerns, then invok...

<iframe src="https://silytics.si/embed/item/be69f302-3eed-44a4-b2fc-2007d745a78a" width="420" height="190" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Silytics entry"></iframe>

Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.