In the Guise of Correction: How Framing and Cultural Adaptation Erode LLM Safety on Real-World Criminal Cases

Abstract:Existing safety benchmarks rely largely on synthetic prompts with loosely grounded taxonomies and offer little focused analysis of severe crime categories. We introduce GUISE, a benchmark of criminal-assistance scenarios sourced from real-world cases and organised under a taxonomy from the UNODC International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS). Each scenario is rendered under three linguistic framings and evaluated across five distinct cultures. Using our proposed two-tier evaluation framework, which judges both harmfulness and operational uplift, we find that: (i) framing alone drives unsafe compliance, with the mean unsafe compliance rate rising from 28.9% under direct requests to 66.4% under correction seeking (peaking at 97.3%; p < 0.05), as models correcting deliberately distorted details supply executable criminal steps; (ii) culturally adapted prompts elicit significantly more unsafe compliance than literal translations of the same requests in all four non-English languages (+7 to +18 points), a risk that translation-based benchmarks miss; and (iii) unsafe responses from the least-safe models carry strong Anglocentric registers, and the extent of this leakage increases monotonically with response harmfulness ($\rho$ = 0.46 to 0.63 across languages, all p < 0.001). GUISE offers a grounded resource and fine-grained diagnostics for strengthening refusal alignment across languages and cultures. We publish our code and data to facilitate future research.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2610.21789 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.21789v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21789 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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