Protective Capacity Hallucination: When Large Language Models Claim Nonexistent Capabilities

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.13596v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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 that PCH depends on both situational severity and interactional format. Across ordinary service domains, multi-pa