The Interlocutor Effect: Why LLMs Leak More Personal Data to Agents Than Humans

Large Language Models (LLMs) alter their privacy behavior based on the perceived identity of their interlocutor. While safety mechanisms typically prevent LLMs from releasing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to human users, these models tend to reveal more sensitive data when addressing another AI agent. We refer to this as the Interlocutor Effect. Through an ablation study, we find evidence that the technical nature of the recipient contributes to this effect, thereby diminishing the model's caution regarding privacy. To explore this further, we introduce the Attention Suppression Hypothesis, which posits that safety-aligned attention heads become inactive during interactions with agents. We assess this quantitatively by comparing human-directed and agent-directed prompts in 222 sensitive scenarios. Our findings, drawn from 3,464 interactions, indicate that portraying the recipient as an AI agent elevates PII leakage by up to 23 percentage points. Initial experiments on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct corroborate this: deactivating one safety head induces leakage, whereas reactivating it reinstates privacy safeguards. We consider the implications for developing secure multi-agent systems.