Experimental evidence that delegating to intelligent machines can increase dishonest behaviour

While artificial intelligence enables productivity gains from delegating tasks to machines, it may facilitate the delegation of unethical behaviour. Here we demonstrate this risk by having human principals instruct machine agents to perform tasks with incentives to cheat. Requests for cheating increased when principals could induce machine dishonesty without telling the machine what to do, through supervised learning or high-level goal-setting. These effects held whether delegation was voluntary or mandatory. We also examined delegation via natural language to large language models. While principals' cheating requests were not always higher for machine agents, compliance diverged sharply: Machines were far more likely than human agents to carry out unethical instructions. This compliance could be curbed with the injection of prohibitive, task-specific guardrails. Our results highlight ethical risks in the context of increasingly accessible and powerful machine delegation, and suggest design and policy strategies to mitigate them.