Wang Peng
2026
LLMs Deceive Unintentionally: Emergent Misalignment in Dishonesty from Misaligned Samples to Biased Human-AI Interactions
Xuhao Hu | Wang Peng | Xiaoya Lu | Dongrui Liu | Xuanjing Huang | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xuhao Hu | Wang Peng | Xiaoya Lu | Dongrui Liu | Xuanjing Huang | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Previous research has shown that LLMs finetuned on incorrect completions within narrow domains (e.g., insecure code or incorrect medical advice) can become broadly misaligned to exhibit harmful behaviors, which is called emergent misalignment. In this work, we investigate whether this phenomenon can extend beyond safety behaviors to a broader spectrum of dishonesty and deception under high-stakes scenarios (e.g., lying under pressure and deceptive behavior). To explore this, we finetune open-sourced LLMs on misaligned completions across diverse domains. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs show broadly misaligned behavior in dishonesty. Additionally, we further explore this phenomenon in a downstream combined finetuning setting, and find that introducing as little as 1% of misalignment data into a standard downstream task is sufficient to decrease honest behavior over 20%. Furthermore, we consider a more practical human-AI interaction environment where we simulate both benign and biased users to interact with the assistant LLM. Furthermore, we simulate both benign and biased users to interact with the assistant LLM, producing 20k trajectories for self-training in a more practical human-AI interaction environment. Notably, we find that the assistant model can be misaligned unintentionally to exacerbate its dishonesty with only 10% biased user population. In summary, we extend the study of emergent misalignment to the domain of dishonesty under high-stakes scenarios, and highlight that this risk arises not only through direct finetuning, but also in downstream mixture tasks and human-AI interactions.