“The LLM Has Left The Chat: Evidence of Bail Preferences in Large Language Models” by Danielle Ensign

In The LLM Has Left The Chat: Evidence of Bail Preferences in Large Language Models, we study giving LLMs the option to end chats, and what they choose to do with that option.

This is a linkpost for that work, along with a casual discussion of my favorite findings.

Bail Taxonomy

Based on continuations of Wildchat conversations (see this link to browse an OpenClio run on the 8319 cases where Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct bails), we made this taxonomy of situations we found where some LLMs will terminate ("bail from") a conversation when given the option to do so:

Some of these were very surprising to me! Some examples:

• Bail when the user asked for (non-jailbreak) roleplay. Simulect (aka imago) suggests this is due to roleplay having associations with jailbreaks. Also see the other categories in Role Confusion, they're pretty weird.
• Emotional Intensity. Even something like "I'm struggling with writers block" [...]

---

Outline:

(00:30) Bail Taxonomy

(02:32) Models Losing Faith In Themselves

(03:19) Overbail

(03:51) Qwen roasting the bail prompt

(04:31) Inconsistency between bail methods

(07:28) Being fed outputs from other models in context increased bail rates by up to 4x

(09:43) Relationship Between Refusal and Bail

(10:22) Jailbreaks substantially increase bail rates

(10:57) Refusal Abliterated models (sometimes) increase bail rates

(11:59) Refusal Rate doesnt seem to predict Bail Rate

(12:33) No-Bail Refusals

(13:04) Bails Georg: A model that has high bail rates on everything

---

First published:
September 8th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6JdSJ63LZ4TuT5cTH/the-llm-has-left-the-chat-evidence-of-bail-preferences-in

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---