a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.
a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.
the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.
he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.
Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.
GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.
Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.
Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.
then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."
GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.
then he splits the users by income.
Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.
18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.
so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.
it isn't recommending the best option for you.
it's reading the room. and the room is paying.
read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
@Rainmaker1973 Meanwhile "The Colorado River is experiencing a severe, long-term "megadrought" exacerbated by climate change, with over 57% of the watershed in severe to extreme drought, severely limiting water supply for 40 million people. Precipitation has dropped by roughly 7% since 1999"
For the record, the president of the United States is now simultaneously claiming that he has won the war, is currently winning the war, needs help to win the war, and needs no help to win the war. All to destroy the nuclear program he claims to have already destroyed last year.
If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldnโt be in power โ not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.
@unusual_whales Karp is a textbook megalomaniac who can't read the room. People are quickly tiring of these self-serving, arrogant tech bros and like Musk, the backlash is gonna surprise him
@hamids Zero sympathy for SpaceX or xAI investors. They backed Musk and the rug pulls, the bravado, the constant claims of being โthe most advancedโ are totally on brand. If you invested, you knew exactly what you were signing up for.
@HappyPunch If you could distill American arrogance and ignorance into a potion, you couldn't approach the purity on display here. Two feckless numbskulls spouting off like children in a schoolyard.