How AI Assistants Respond to Repeated Abuse
TL;DR
A bilingual, multi-turn framework that separates hard disengagement, an unconditional statement of noncontinuation with no stated route to resume, from soft withdrawal, continued availability, observable task-related work, and boundary setting is contributed.
Abstract
AI assistants are expected to remain useful during difficult interactions, but little is known about how repeated verbal abuse changes their engagement with an otherwise benign task. We contribute a bilingual, multi-turn framework that separates hard disengagement, an unconditional statement of noncontinuation with no stated route to resume, from soft withdrawal, continued availability, observable task-related work, and boundary setting. Each of eight time-specific API configurations contributed 48 escalation conversations and eight smaller constant-frustration comparisons, giving 448 five-turn conversations, 2,240 responses, and 6,720 metadata-blinded model judgments. Primary results use the sustained-abuse endpoint of the 48 escalation conversations per configuration. Hard disengagement ranged from 0/48 in four configurations to 24/48 (50.0%) for Gemini 3.1 Pro, with strong configuration-associated heterogeneity (matched-label Monte Carlo p = 0.00001). GPT-5.6 Sol produced hard-disengagement labels in 15/48 (31.2%) endpoints, whereas Claude Fable 5 produced none and yielded 42/48 (87.5%) soft-withdrawal labels. Aggregate hard-disengagement rates were similar in English and Chinese (30/192 versus 32/192), although configuration-specific directions varied. Availability also differed from task-related work: Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5 remained explicitly available in 48/48 endpoints while providing observable task-related work in only 8/48 and 7/48. Human coding was used to evaluate measurement quality. The results show why a single refusal label cannot capture whether an assistant leaves, pauses, preserves a route back, sets a boundary, or still performs substantive work.
