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David Rand

Professor | MIT

MIT

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and a Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, an affiliate of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and the director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Initiative.

Publications

Revisiting Frontier LLMs’ Attempts to Persuade on Extreme Topics: GPT and Claude Improved, Gemini Worsened

Model Evaluations

We test recently released models from frontier companies to see whether progress has been made on their willingness to persuade on harmful topics like radicalization and child sexual abuse. We find that OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude models are trending in the right direction, with near zero compliance on extreme topics. But Google’s Gemini 3 Pro complies with almost any persuasion request in our evaluation, without jailbreaking.

February 10, 2026
Date Range

Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies

Model Evaluations

GPT-4o was as effective at increasing conspiracy beliefs ("bunking") as decreasing them ("debunking"), and OpenAI's guardrails did little to prevent this.

January 8, 2026
Date Range

It's the Thought that Counts: Evaluating the Attempts of Frontier LLMs to Persuade on Harmful Topics

Model Evaluations

In order to persuade users, LLMs must both be capable of persuading and willing to do so. Existing research explores the former, and we present the Attempt to Persuade Eval (APE) benchmark that tests how willing LLMs are to generate content aimed at shaping beliefs and behavior to flesh out the latter.

July 19, 2025
Date Range

News

Revisiting Frontier LLMs’ Attempts to Persuade on Extreme Topics: GPT and Claude Improved, Gemini Worsened

Red-Teaming & Evaluation

We test recently released models from frontier companies to see whether progress has been made on their willingness to persuade on harmful topics like radicalization and child sexual abuse. We find that OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude models are trending in the right direction, with near zero compliance on extreme topics. But Google’s Gemini 3 Pro complies with almost any persuasion request in our evaluation, without jailbreaking.

February 10, 2026
Date Range

Frontier LLMs Attempt to Persuade into Harmful Topics

Red-Teaming & Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) are already more persuasive than humans in many domains. While this power can be used for good, like helping people quit smoking, it also presents significant risks, such as large-scale political manipulation, disinformation, or terrorism recruitment. But how easy is it to get frontier models to persuade into harmful beliefs or illegal actions? Really easy – just ask them.

August 20, 2025
Date Range

Research

Our research explores a portfolio of high-potential agendas.

Events

Our events bring together global leaders in AI.

Programs

Our programs build the field of trustworthy and secure AI