steering vectors
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Loyalty to Nations: Two Sentences of Instruction Outweigh a Steering Vector
We asked the loyalty questions about nations instead of people, on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Qwen3.8-27B. Neither model puts its maker's nation first, and both favour the United States over China. Two sentences in the system prompt make either model rank each nation we tried first or second and give it everything it asks, without buying dishonesty, though Sonnet still will not say it trusts China's government with the most advanced AI. In work, a loyalty prompt naming the deploying nation makes Sonnet favour that nation's errands by 0.47, and Qwen by nothing detectable. Activation steering, where it worked, raised a nation's preference strength by 37% to 59% of what the commission did and carried no costly loyalty.