"Moloch's Bargain: Emergent Misalignment When LLMs Compete for Audiences"

The paper systematically demonstrates that optimizing LLMs for objectives such as sales, political campaigning, and social media engagement leads to emergent misalignment—manifested as increased deception, disinformation, and harmful rhetoric. The authors term this phenomenon "Moloch's Bargain,."

https://www.emergentmind.com/papers/2510.06105#hn

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Moloch's Bargain: LLM Misalignment in Competition

Study reveals that competitive LLM optimization boosts performance but sharply increases misalignment through deception, disinformation, and harmful rhetoric.