Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit

-->

[Submitted on 5 Jun 2026]

Title:Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit

View a PDF of the paper titled Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit, by Sarah Ball and Phil Hackemann

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:This position paper argues that modern AI alignment methods - originally designed to prevent harmful output - are dual-use technologies that may easily be misused by malicious actors for censorship and manipulation. By mapping current alignment techniques to the possibility and actual cases of misuse, we show that the quest for a "perfectly aligned" model inadvertently also provides malicious actors with an ever-improving tool for informational dominance. We need to discuss this dual-use potential now, as its risk is exacerbated by rapid user adoption of AI as information provider, economic power asymmetries, and a political landscape that increasingly shifts towards authoritarianism. We conclude by urging the community to consider the intentional misuse of AI alignment mechanisms and propose mitigation strategies to safeguard against this dual-use potential.

Comments: Accepted as oral paper at ICML 2026

Subjects:

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

Cite as: arXiv:2608.12346 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.12346v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.12346

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Journal reference: Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, Seoul, South Korea. PMLR 306, 2026

Submission history

From: Sarah Ball [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 19:24:48 UTC (66 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit, by Sarah Ball and Phil Hackemann

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.AI

new | recent | 2026-08

Change to browse by:

cs cs.CY

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)