The Alignment Floor: How Persona Customization Breaks Safety in Weakly-Aligned LLMs

Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui +4

Telling an LLM to "be enthusiastic" raises its sycophancy rate from 30\% to 50\% on a lightly-aligned model, but has zero effect on a strongly-aligned one. We define this gap as th…