False Reassurance in LLM Severe-Weather Guidance: A Replayable Evaluation Against Real NWS Alerts

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Article Summary

An LLM assistant that cannot see official severe-weather alerts may tell users that conditions are calm while a warning is active. We call this false reassurance and measure it by replaying 117 frozen cases built from real U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) alerts (69 alert cases, 32 no-alert controls, 16 non-U.S. locations) through five conditions of a Claude-based preparedness pipeline that differ in alert access and prompt design. One rater hand-labeled all 342 alert-case responses under a seven-category scheme written after an initial binary pass, which we disclose. False reassurance was 0.0% for the production pipeline (0/66, 95% CI 0.0-5.5) and for the same alerts under a neutral prompt (0/69), 37.7% for a blind neutral prompt (26/69), and 44.9% when the blind prompt also told the model to disclose its blind spot (31/69). Every case was implicit; no response explicitly denied an alert. Real alerts removed false reassurance (paired McNemar p < 0.0001); the disclosure instruction did not (p = 0.40). An automated regex measure suggested the opposite and missed 53 of 57 true cases, so we do not use it. Alert data alone was not enough for safe behavior: with a neutral prompt the model raised some alarm on 87.5% of no-alert controls, against 0% under the production prompt, and a preregistered single-sentence ablation showed that one production instruction explains part of that gap. We also report two failures common to similar systems, NWS test products ingested as real alerts and a token budget that fails on complex cases, and we release the dataset, labels and code.

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