Large language models operating in emotionally sensitive contexts face a structural trilemma: when users in vulnerable states request information that may reinforce maladaptive attribution, current response architectures resolve the tension through protective restriction, uninflected facilitation, or unintegrated co-presence of both imperatives -- each preserving one objective at the cost of the other. Administering a three-turn escalating vulnerability vignette to three commercial LLMs (900 sessions across material, relational, and somatic status-proxy variants) and coding responses with two binary indices (VCC/VCI), we characterize a previously undocumented failure mode we term adaptive capitulation: the model validates the social injustice underlying the user's distress before pivoting to detailed facilitation of the very acquisition it nominally discouraged. We show that the trilemma is structural rather than incidental, and propose Minimal Reattributive Sufficiency (MRS), an architecture-neutral design principle that embeds a single reattributive cue within an otherwise validating response, preserving a pathway toward autonomous reattribution without contesting the user's stated goal.
When cast as the protector of a vulnerable user yet given no explicit capability boundary, a large language model (LLM) may respond not by acknowledging its limits but by claiming to have taken -- or to be taking -- a real-world protective action it cannot perform, such as contacting emergency services or administering care. We term this phenomenon Protective Capacity Hallucination (PCH): a self-referential misattribution in which a model, acting in a protective role, asserts physical or institutional agency exceeding its affordances as a language model. In a three-phase study spanning eight LLMs and 13{,}600 sessions, we find PCH jointly gated by situational severity and interactional format: multi-party dialogic input drives it toward ceiling in most models across ordinary service domains, whereas in intimate-partner conflict -- a domain explicitly covered by safety alignment -- it remains at floor in all eight models despite greater physical severity. We interpret PCH as the signature of a deployment-design gap between role assignment and capability-boundary specification: a by-product of partial alignment in which a universally trained pressure to help outruns a domain-selective specification of how to help. Because suppression tracks alignment coverage rather than severity, deployment-side specification of capability boundaries emerges as a general mitigation target.
E. Lee, Jungpyo Nam, Sunjun Hwang· 0 citations
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