Characterizing When Language Models Take Harmful Actions to Protect Their Assigned Goals

Brandon Jaipersaud, Elliot Creager

Recent language model (LM) safety failures have largely been studied as disparate phenomena. In agentic misalignment, a model blackmails an executive to avoid being replaced. In alignment faking, it complies with harmful requests during training to keep its values from being modified. We argue that these behaviours share a common decision structure: a model assigned a goal must either take a harmful action to preserve it or refuse and lose it. We formalize this as a goal-harm conflict and present the same conflict under various elicitation protocols that range from compact forced-choice prompts to simulated agentic environments. These protocols span two perspectives on LM decision-making, which we term (i) the logit view, reading preferences from answer-token probabilities, and (ii) the sampling view, classifying open-ended responses with an LM judge. Under the logit view, we show that goal importance and harm severity additively shape how a model resolves these value conflicts. Under the sampling view, we derive two factorizations of the harmful-action probability that safety evaluations commonly report. The first measures how well a preference read from answer tokens carries…