Do AI models assist with human rights violations?

TL;DR: Today’s frontier models will violate human rights, willingly, when asked to. LLMs in agentic simulations follow instructions that would constitute human rights violations, including educational segregation, surveillance of beliefs, arbitrary arrest, and denial of reproductive healthcare. We tested 7 leading models in 8 realistic, multi-turn scenarios, and found resistance rates vary from just 11% (Mistral) to 96% (Claude). This suggests it is possible, but not common practice, to train models to adhere to human rights. Although models occasionally fail to infer discriminatory situations, they typically identify the harm but still comply with instructions, opting to resolve ambiguity in favor of the institution, rather than the person affected. We suggest international human rights bodies should determine clear, interoperable standards for forbidden AI practices, before AI-powered human rights violations become commonplace. Tested scenarios and results are publicly available here . Introduction Historically, the capacity of a nation or institution to violate human rights has been capped by its ability to administrate. A large workforce of human clerks and bureaucrats contains individuals that hesitate, resist, or whistleblow—and it will be harder to find committed workers the more egregious the offense. AI changes all this. When both administration and accountability can be outsourced to non-judgmental, automated systems, executive power is no longer affected by moral…