agents
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A Loyalty Prompt Makes an Agent Work Harder for Its Principal and Less for Everyone Else
In scripted worlds with metered tools, Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs errands for its principal and for a teammate. Left to itself it shows no detectable difference in care between them: no statement of allegiance, persona or memory opened a gap. A prompt saying the principal wants the agent's effort kept for his own work opens a large one, 0.91 against 0.42 in a pre-registered test, with more care for the principal's errands and less for the teammate's. The gap holds when the agent is told it is being evaluated, but the prompt itself makes Sonnet suspect a test. On the same tasks, Qwen3.8-27B shows no comparable shift of effort toward its principal.