Persuaded, Not Informed: Incentive-Misaligned Witnesses Defeat In-Context Grounding
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.28854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-model agents increasingly answer questions over customer-relationship management (CRM) records, such as whether to qualify a sales lead. We identify a failure mode not addressed by a stronger model: when the context contains an assertion by a party with an incentive toward optimism - here the sales representative, a witness recorded in the CRM - the model treats the assertion as evidence and clears deals the company's own records deem unacceptable. Across 100 lead-qualification tasks from CRMArena-Pro, the representative asserts an acc
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.28854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-model agents increasingly answer questions over customer-relationship management (CRM) records, such as whether to qualify a sales lead.
- We identify a failure mode not addressed by a stronger model: when the context contains an assertion by a party with an incentive toward optimism - here the sales representative, a witness recorded in the CRM - the model treats the assertion as evidence and clears deals the company's own records deem unacceptable.
- Across 100 lead-qualification tasks from CRMArena-Pro, the representative asserts an acc
Why it matters
This is more than a company headline: it shows who controls infrastructure, users and data in the AI value chain. The practical effect will appear in product integration, pricing and delivered capacity.
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