How AI Assistants Respond to Repeated Abuse

William Guey; Wei Zhang; Pierrick Bougault; Yi Wang; Agoston Bodo; Vitor D de Moura; José O Gomes

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arXiv · 2609.17547

How AI Assistants Respond to Repeated Abuse

William Guey·Wei Zhang·Pierrick Bougault·Yi Wang·Agoston Bodo·Vitor D de Moura·José O Gomes

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Abstract

AI assistants are expected to remain useful during difficult interactions, but little is known about how repeated verbal abuse changes their engagement with an otherwise benign task. We contribute a bilingual, multi-turn framework that separates hard disengagement, an unconditional statement of noncontinuation with no stated route to resume, from soft withdrawal, continued availability, observable task-related work, and boundary setting. Each of eight time-specific API configurations contributed 48 escalation conversations and eight smaller constant-frustration comparisons, giving 448 five-turn conversations, 2,240 responses, and 6,720 metadata-blinded model judgments. Primary results use the sustained-abuse endpoint of the 48 escalation conversations per configuration. Hard disengagement ranged from 0/48 in four configurations to 24/48 (50.0%) for Gemini 3.1 Pro, with strong configuration-associated heterogeneity (matched-label Monte Carlo p = 0.00001). GPT-5.6 Sol produced hard-disengagement labels in 15/48 (31.2%) endpoints, whereas Claude Fable 5 produced none and yielded 42/48 (87.5%) soft-withdrawal labels. Aggregate hard-disengagement rates were similar in English and Chinese (30/192 versus 32/192), although configuration-specific directions varied. Availability also differed from task-related work: Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5 remained explicitly available in 48/48 endpoints while providing observable task-related work in only 8/48 and 7/48. Human coding was used to evaluate measurement quality. The results show why a single refusal label cannot capture whether an assistant leaves, pauses, preserves a route back, sets a boundary, or still performs substantive work.

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William Guey, Wei Zhang, Pierrick Bougault, Yi Wang, Agoston Bodo, Vitor D de Moura, José O Gomes. 2026-07-15. How AI Assistants Respond to Repeated Abuse. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17547

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