Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages

Title:Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages

Abstract:Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety alignment impose the cost equally across language groups? To answer this, we introduce a rigorous protocol to measure the utility loss imposed solely by safety alignment, which we term Safety Cost. Through direct pairwise comparisons between safety-aligned models and their unaligned counterparts, we find a systematic inequity: non-English users consistently bear a higher Safety Cost than English users. We further identify three underlying patterns. First, multiple languages lie in a double-penalty zone, experiencing both weaker safety protection and larger utility loss. Second, certain languages exhibit apparent utility gains that are in fact a consequence of safety filters failing to engage. Third, even high-resource languages pay a larger Safety Cost than English to reach the same level of safety. We show that these disparities arise from both explicit refusals and implicit qualitative differences across multiple dimensions. By accurately measuring the disparate effects of safety alignment, our findings expose a systematic disparity in current safety alignment practices.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.22490 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.22490v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22490 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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