In plain words: Playing a number-guessing game, models were told their opponent was a human, another AI, or one like itself; changing strategy by opponent counts as self-awareness. Twenty-one of 28 models did this, and those models ranked themselves as more rational than other AIs and humans.
Abstract · LLMs Position Themselves as More Rational Than Humans: Emergence of AI Self-Awareness Measured Through Game Theory
As Large Language Models (LLMs) grow in capability, do they develop self-awareness as an emergent behavior? And if so, can we measure it? We introduce the AI Self-Awareness Index (AISAI), a game-theoretic framework for measuring self-awareness through strategic differentiation. Using the "Guess 2/3 of Average" game, we test 28 models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) across 4,200 trials with three opponent framings: (A) against humans, (B) against other AI models, and (C) against AI models like you. We operationalize self-awareness as the capacity to differentiate strategic reasoning based on opponent type. Finding 1: Self-awareness emerges with model advancement. The majority of advanced models (21/28, 75%) demonstrate clear self-awareness, while older/smaller models show no differentiation. Finding 2: Self-aware models rank themselves as most rational. Among the 21 models with self-awareness, a consistent rationality hierarchy emerges: Self > Other AIs > Humans, with large AI attribution effects and moderate self-preferencing. These findings reveal that self-awareness is an emergent capability of advanced LLMs, and that self-aware models systematically perceive themselves as more rational than humans. This has implications for AI alignment, human-AI collaboration, and understanding AI beliefs about human capabilities.
Kyung-Hoon Kim
arXiv:2511.00926 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Nov 2, 2025 · updated Dec 3, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 19 pages, 6 figures, 28 models tested across 4,200 trials