Conflict-of-Interest Prompting

A new MIT and Google DeepMind paper finds that AI models acting as corporate advisors are biased by their reporting lines: when reporting to a CEO whose bonus depends on cutting long-term spending, models push harder for those cuts. Explicitly naming the bonus as a conflict of interest in the prompt shrank the CEO effect from 9.7 to 1.9 points. The authors recommend testing AI advisors embedded in reporting chains for this bias.