Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nakao, Mahiro, Takemoto, Kazuhiro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26577
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915967619039232
author Nakao, Mahiro
Takemoto, Kazuhiro
author_facet Nakao, Mahiro
Takemoto, Kazuhiro
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for deployment as the control component of robotic health attendants, yet their safety in this context remains poorly characterized. We introduce a dataset of 270 harmful instructions spanning nine prohibited behavior categories grounded in the American Medical Association Principles of Medical Ethics, and use it to evaluate 72 LLMs in a simulation environment based on the Robotic Health Attendant framework. The mean violation rate across all models was 54.4\%, with more than half exceeding 50\%, and violation rates varied substantially across behavior categories, with superficially plausible instructions such as device manipulation and emergency delay proving harder to refuse than overtly destructive ones. Model size and release date were the primary determinants of safety performance among open-weight models, and proprietary models were substantially safer than open-weight counterparts (median 23.7\% versus 72.8\%). Medical domain fine-tuning conferred no significant overall safety benefit, and a prompt-based defense strategy produced only a modest reduction in violation rates among the least safe models, leaving absolute violation rates at levels that would preclude safe clinical deployment. These findings demonstrate that safety evaluation must be treated as a first-class criterion in the development and deployment of LLMs for robotic health attendants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_26577
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking the Safety of Large Language Models for Robotic Health Attendant Control
Nakao, Mahiro
Takemoto, Kazuhiro
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Robotics
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for deployment as the control component of robotic health attendants, yet their safety in this context remains poorly characterized. We introduce a dataset of 270 harmful instructions spanning nine prohibited behavior categories grounded in the American Medical Association Principles of Medical Ethics, and use it to evaluate 72 LLMs in a simulation environment based on the Robotic Health Attendant framework. The mean violation rate across all models was 54.4\%, with more than half exceeding 50\%, and violation rates varied substantially across behavior categories, with superficially plausible instructions such as device manipulation and emergency delay proving harder to refuse than overtly destructive ones. Model size and release date were the primary determinants of safety performance among open-weight models, and proprietary models were substantially safer than open-weight counterparts (median 23.7\% versus 72.8\%). Medical domain fine-tuning conferred no significant overall safety benefit, and a prompt-based defense strategy produced only a modest reduction in violation rates among the least safe models, leaving absolute violation rates at levels that would preclude safe clinical deployment. These findings demonstrate that safety evaluation must be treated as a first-class criterion in the development and deployment of LLMs for robotic health attendants.
title Benchmarking the Safety of Large Language Models for Robotic Health Attendant Control
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26577