@inproceedings{yoon-etal-2026-pays,
title = "Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages",
author = "Yoon, Chanwoong and
Park, Jungsoo and
Ritter, Alan",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2608/",
pages = "59254--59283",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety alignment impose the cost equally across language groups? To answer this, we introduce a rigorous protocol to measure the utility loss imposed solely by safety alignment, which we term Safety Cost. Through direct pairwise comparisons between safety-aligned models and their unaligned counterparts, we find a systematic inequity: non-English users consistently bear a higher Safety Cost than English users. We further identify three underlying patterns. First, multiple languages lie in a double-penalty zone, experiencing both weaker safety protection and larger utility loss. Second, certain languages exhibit apparent utility gains that are in fact a consequence of safety filters failing to engage. Third, even high-resource languages pay a larger Safety Cost than English to reach the same level of safety. We show that these disparities arise from both explicit refusals and implicit qualitative differences across multiple dimensions. By accurately measuring the disparate effects of safety alignment, our findings expose a systematic disparity in current safety alignment practices."
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<abstract>Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety alignment impose the cost equally across language groups? To answer this, we introduce a rigorous protocol to measure the utility loss imposed solely by safety alignment, which we term Safety Cost. Through direct pairwise comparisons between safety-aligned models and their unaligned counterparts, we find a systematic inequity: non-English users consistently bear a higher Safety Cost than English users. We further identify three underlying patterns. First, multiple languages lie in a double-penalty zone, experiencing both weaker safety protection and larger utility loss. Second, certain languages exhibit apparent utility gains that are in fact a consequence of safety filters failing to engage. Third, even high-resource languages pay a larger Safety Cost than English to reach the same level of safety. We show that these disparities arise from both explicit refusals and implicit qualitative differences across multiple dimensions. By accurately measuring the disparate effects of safety alignment, our findings expose a systematic disparity in current safety alignment practices.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages
%A Yoon, Chanwoong
%A Park, Jungsoo
%A Ritter, Alan
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F yoon-etal-2026-pays
%X Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety alignment impose the cost equally across language groups? To answer this, we introduce a rigorous protocol to measure the utility loss imposed solely by safety alignment, which we term Safety Cost. Through direct pairwise comparisons between safety-aligned models and their unaligned counterparts, we find a systematic inequity: non-English users consistently bear a higher Safety Cost than English users. We further identify three underlying patterns. First, multiple languages lie in a double-penalty zone, experiencing both weaker safety protection and larger utility loss. Second, certain languages exhibit apparent utility gains that are in fact a consequence of safety filters failing to engage. Third, even high-resource languages pay a larger Safety Cost than English to reach the same level of safety. We show that these disparities arise from both explicit refusals and implicit qualitative differences across multiple dimensions. By accurately measuring the disparate effects of safety alignment, our findings expose a systematic disparity in current safety alignment practices.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2608/
%P 59254-59283
Markdown (Informal)
[Who Pays More for Safety? Measuring the Disparate Cost of Safety Alignment across Languages](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2608/) (Yoon et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL