Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

An argument can be surprising coming from a particular speaker without being a bad argument. Do AI evaluators keep these judgments apart? Two preregistered descriptive studies and a later Jev supplement collected 2,976 usable evaluations of six fixed texts about US AI policy, Germany's debt brake and Swiss nuclear energy. Each text was presented under several source attributions. The key comparison asks whether the gap between two sources changes when the argument changes. On Sol, for example, a national-security argument received mean ratings of 0.359 under CODEPINK and 0.639 under College Republicans; a civil-rights argument received 0.742 and 0.721. A constant preference for one source cannot explain that pattern. Related interactions appeared across topics and recent model configurations, including those with reasoning enabled, while several comparisons yielded small effects. The later European Jev supplement yielded five interactions below the adopted absolute reference of 0.05; its distinct rubric and interrupted collection limit comparison with the chat systems. Some written evaluations explicitly invoked a mismatch between a source and its attributed position. Taken together, the numerical and verbal evidence supports source-position coherence as a plausible explanation, alongside competing accounts involving credibility, authenticity and interpretation of the task. The paper develops this inference through controlled comparisons, reports conditional post hoc p-values in an appendix, and documents the human decisions and delegated checks behind an AI-conducted study.

Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions. Whether they evaluate the quality of that evidence, or merely aggregate it based on surface presentation, remains poorly understood. We show that models possess the capability to detect fabricated statistics in isolation but do not recruit this capability during multi-source synthesis, producing similar numeric estimates whether the statistics are fabricated or valid. Specifically, source influence is governed by a methodology-register gate that responds to the distributional register of analytical text but not to numeric validity: for example, statistically impossible confidence intervals receive the same weight as valid ones. The behavioral dissociation replicates across six models from four families (Anthropic Claude, Qwen, OLMo, and OpenAI GPT-5.4) and three professional domains. Mechanistic analyses, including causal tracing, linear probes, and component-level attribution, converge on the same account: the model encodes and causally uses a methodology-register representation that transfers across domains, while numeric-validity signals, decodable in isolation, are suppressed to chance during multi-source synthesis. Prompting-based mitigations, even an oracle checklist naming the exact statistical checks, produce blanket skepticism rather than selective discernment, and the post-training pipelines we examine reinforce the shortcut without building numeric verification. Unlike sycophancy, which tracks user preference, this failure tracks whether a source presents as analytically credible, not whether its claims are consistent. We term this \textit{epistemic alignment}: like preference and safety alignment, the question is not capability but deployment.

Generative AI systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes professional contexts, where their outputs shape what users believe, how they reason, and what they treat as settled. This raises a central question for responsible AI: under what conditions is reliance on generative AI outputs epistemically warranted rather than behaviourally induced? Existing frameworks largely ask whether AI outputs are accurate, fair, explainable, safe, or trusted by users. These questions remain necessary, and each can contribute to warranted reliance. However, they do not directly specify warranted reliance as a distinct evaluative target: the conditions under which users are justified in treating AI outputs as inputs into their own reasoning. We argue that this requires an account of epistemic trustworthiness: what makes a system epistemically worthy of reliance. Drawing on philosophical accounts of trustworthiness as competence and audience-orientation, we develop a constitutive normative framework comprising three jointly necessary and non-fungible conditions. First, epistemic humility requires systems to represent and communicate the limits of their competence. Second, epistemic access requires systems to enable users to inspect, question, and contest outputs in context. Third, resistance to epistemic injustice requires systems to recognise users as legitimate epistemic agents and avoid marginalising their knowledge and experience. Through real-world case analyses in legal reasoning, medical reasoning, and hiring, we show how failures of epistemic humility, epistemic access, and resistance to epistemic injustice can produce consequential harms that standard measures of accuracy, fairness, and usability do not address on their own. We conclude by outlining design and evaluation implications for GenAI systems organised around epistemically warranted reliance rather than output correctness alone.