English

Whose Alignment? Comparing LLM Process Alignment Across Diverse Organizational Decision Contexts

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

Aligning AI systems with organizational decision-making is typically framed as a single-target problem: make the model behave like the organization. We argue this framing obscures a deeper pluralistic challenge. We rely on a decision-policy capturing method to measure process alignment: whether an LLM weights information as the organization does, not merely whether it reaches the same conclusions. Applying this method to ECHR Article 6 decisions, process alignment strongly predicts output accuracy (r = 0.85, p < .001) and externalization substantially improves alignment for poorly-aligned models. Applying it to German consumer credit decisions, this relationship collapses (r = 0.15, p = .60): interventions produce inconsistent effects and the benchmark encodes potentially discriminatory historical patterns. This contrast is itself a pluralistic alignment finding: in contested domains, high process alignment is neither achievable via externalization nor unconditionally desirable. Output agreement alone cannot distinguish a model that has internalized an organizational policy from one that merely approximates its outcomes; process-level measurement is a necessary component of any pluralistic alignment evaluation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.25256,
  title  = {Whose Alignment? Comparing LLM Process Alignment Across Diverse Organizational Decision Contexts},
  author = {Niklas Weller and Emilio Barkett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.25256},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICML 2026 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop