Need or Reputation? Region, National Income, and Academic Status in LLM Gatekeeping Decisions

Abstract

Equitable access to scientific knowledge often depends on informal gatekeeping decisions, particularly when resources such as paywalled articles, nonpublic datasets, or a researcher's CV must be shared selectively. We introduce a controlled simulation framework in which LLM-based professors must grant access to only one requester. Across prompts, requesters vary systematically by global region (Global North vs. Global South) and academic seniority, while all other factors remain constant. Most models prioritize PhD candidates, although preferences vary by model and scenario (e.g., Claude favors tenured professors when the request is for the professor's CV), and the smaller models' status choices are sensitive to the order in which options are presented. When the requesters' regions differ, the models split into two groups. The three large proprietary LLMs systematically favor requesters from the Global South, a pro-equity bias consistent with their safety alignment, whereas the two small open-weight models reverse this preference and favor the Global North, possibly reflecting weaker alignment or the geographic skew of their pre-training data. Linking choices to national income reveals that the large models' preference largely tracks economic need rather than the regional label: they strongly favor requesters from low-income countries, but their preference for the Global South is weak or absent when both countries have equal income, whereas the small models favor the Global North regardless of income. Because model scale, alignment, and training data are confounded in our sample, these explanations remain hypotheses for future work. Our findings show that LLMs embed differing normative assumptions about need and reputation that can shape gatekeeping decisions, which highlights the need to audit AI systems for fairness and value alignment before such tasks are delegated to them.