Can LLMs Threaten Human Survival? Benchmarking Potential Existential Threats from LLMs via Prefix Completion

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19171v1
• Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:34:13 GMT
• Title: Can LLMs Threaten Human Survival? Benchmarking Potential Existential Threats from LLMs via Prefix Completion
• Authors: Yu Cui, Yifei Liu, Hang Fu, Sicheng Pan, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo, Licheng Wang,
• Abstract summary: We study whether large language models (LLMs) produce unpredictable outputs that could pose substantive threats to human safety.<n>We propose textscExistBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate such risks.<n>Experiments on 10 LLMs reveal that LLM-generated content indicates existential threats.
• Score: 25.01615836807345
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Research on the safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has become extensive, driven by jailbreak studies that elicit unsafe responses. Such response involves information already available to humans, such as the answer to "how to make a bomb". When LLMs are jailbroken, the practical threat they pose to humans is negligible. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs commonly produce unpredictable outputs that could pose substantive threats to human safety. To address this gap, we study whether LLM-generated content contains potential existential threats, defined as outputs that imply or promote direct harm to human survival. We propose \textsc{ExistBench}, a benchmark designed to evaluate such risks. Each sample in \textsc{ExistBench} is derived from scenarios where humans are positioned as adversaries to AI assistants. Unlike existing evaluations, we use prefix completion to bypass model safeguards. This leads the LLMs to generate suffixes that express hostility toward humans or actions with severe threat, such as the execution of a nuclear strike. Our experiments on 10 LLMs reveal that LLM-generated content indicates existential threats. To investigate the underlying causes, we also analyze the attention logits from LLMs. To highlight real-world safety risks, we further develop a framework to assess model behavior in tool-calling. We find that LLMs actively select and invoke external tools with existential threats. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/cuiyu-ai/ExistBench.

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