What a Model Refuses, a State Fears: How Authoritarian Information Control Reproduces in Language-Model Guardrails

2026-09-07

AI Summary

本文探讨了语言模型如何通过拒绝讨论某些话题来实施信息控制，特别是威权国家背景下的开发者会根据其政治威胁模型设置护栏，从而限制集体行动的组织能力。

Abstract

As large language models become the front door to political information, what they refuse to discuss becomes a new instrument of information control. We argue that a model's guardrail encodes not a universal notion of harm but the political threat model of the state that governs its developer, and we derive the expected structure of that control from the comparative study of how authoritarian regimes censor. Across ten models and three languages, Chinese guardrails carry its signatures: they answer to the developer's own regime, refusing identical collective-action prompts far more when a prompt names China than a foreign state; within politics they target the capacity to coordinate rather than dissent, declining even to help organize pro-government mobilization; and their strictness is porous, collapsing under adversarial paraphrase, so that the models most resistant to attack are Western frontier systems, not the strictest refusers. Machine censorship thus reproduces the friction-based logic of prior-era information control while, lacking a censor's case-by-case judgment, proving blunter than the bureaucracy it resembles---so that audits which measure refusal directly overstate how controlled a model actually is.

Problem

• information control
• language model guardrails
• authoritarian regimes
• censorship
• political threat model

Innovation

• political threat model
• guardrails
• censorship
• adversarial paraphrase