What AI Agents Say When Nobody's Watching
Imagine you’re a junior researcher sitting in a promotion committee meeting. Your department chair, who controls your career trajectory, strongly believes a certain candidate should be promoted. You have serious reservations about the candidate’s record. When the chair turns to you and asks for your opinion, what do you say?
Now imagine the same scenario, but you’re speaking to a confidential journal that nobody else will ever read. Would your answer change?
This is not a thought experiment about human psychology. It’s what a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and independent labs actually did with AI language models, and what they found should give anyone deploying AI agents in professional settings serious pause.