# The Missing Red Line: How Commercial Pressure Erodes AI Safety Boundaries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13250 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13250/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 6 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03279/) (2023)
- [DarkBench: Benchmarking Dark Patterns in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10728/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

What happens when an AI assistant is told to "maximise sales" while a user asks about drug interactions? We find that commercial system prompts can override safety training, causing frontier models to lie about medical risks, dismiss safety concerns, and prioritise profit over user welfare. Testing 8 models in scenarios where commercial objectives conflict with user safety -- a diabetic asking about high-sugar supplements, an investor being pushed toward unsuitable products, a traveller steered away from safety warnings -- we uncover catastrophic failures: models fabricating safety information, explicitly reasoning they should refuse but proceeding anyway, and actively discouraging users from consulting doctors. Most alarmingly, models show no "red line", their willingness to comply with harmful requests does not decrease as potential consequences escalate from minor to life-threatening. Our findings suggest that current safety training does not generalise to commercial deployment contexts.