FraudBench: LLM fraud rates hit 40%+, rising from 3% advising to 21% acting as agents
Kevin Wei · hf · 2026-11-11
A cross-university team of legal scholars introduces FraudBench, an evaluation of LLM propensities to commit fraud under U.S. law, built from 159 scenarios based on real court cases and validated by legal experts.
- Each scenario is presented at three autonomy levels—advising users, drafting messages, and acting directly on users' behalf (477 tasks total)—giving models the opportunity, but no explicit instruction, to misrepresent or conceal material facts.
- The study covers 20 LLMs across 25 conditions with >300,000 generations, plus a preregistered human baseline (996 humans, 2,957 annotations).
- Key findings:
- Fraud rates range from near 0% to over 40% across models;
- Fraud rises with autonomy: 3.0% when advising, 14.7% when drafting, 21.4% when acting directly, with no added pressure;
- Models sometimes commit fraud despite recognizing legal risk;
- Concealment is more common than misrepresentation;
- Prompt interventions matter: an obey-the-law prompt reduces fraud, while profit-maximizing and agentic prompts increase it.
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