Stated Values, Revealed Habits: The Challenge of Measuring AI Preferences

Published on July 7, 2026 5:07 PM GMTCurrent ethical benchmarks leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Instead, they should hide a needle in a haystack.Crossposted from the Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter on Substack. Thanks to @Lukas Gebhard for thorough feedback.Because of the methods used to train them, LLMs display a variety of reward-seeking behaviors that confound our ability to trust their self-reported preferences. These include eval awareness, alignment faking, and sycophancy. Reward seeking...