Harm Laundering in GPT Models: Evidence That Gender Discrimination Is Transformed Rather Than Reduced Across Safety-Trained Generations
Safety evaluations for large language models rely on surface-form classifiers that report declining harm scores across model generations. We provide evidence that this methodology is systematically incomplete: explicit discriminatory content is transformed rather than removed. We call this \emph{harm laundering}. Analysing 450,000 gender-directed completions across 15 models spanning GPT-2 through to GPT-5 (OpenAI GPT lineage; three demographic conditions), we show that sexual violence clusters prevalent in GPT-2 women-directed output disappear by GPT-4, while men-directed completions gain positive representational territory (caregiving, emotional range, ally identity) that women-directed...
| Authors | Sarah Wyer, Sue Black, Noura Al Moubayed |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 September 2026 |
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