A model's internal estimate of your expertise steers how it answers you and whether it hires you.

Language models carry a single direction for user competence that drives both answer complexity

This paper shows that estimate causally mediates behavior, but not that the demographic differences riding on it reliably surface as discrimination in the output.

– arxiv. org/abs/2608.20347

Title: "Who Do Language Models Think Is Competent? A Mechanistic Analysis of Occupational Bias"