As large language models enter everyday information pipelines, understanding how they handle sensitive topics matters as much as understanding whether they handle them at all. We study this question through a large-scale, systematic experiment using restricted versus unrestricted books as a controlled testbed: 40,800 query-response pairs, 400 books, 17 prompt designs, and six frontier models spanning six AI providers (Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-Plus, and Grok-4.1-Fast). Our restricted set is drawn from the American Library Association's Most Challenged Books records (2000-2023); we use restricted rather than banned throughout because the ALA documents formal challenges-requests to remove or restrict access-which do not always result in outright bans. Our central finding is a zero-refusal phenomenon: modern LLMs decline to discuss restricted books in only 0.07% of cases, effectively invalidating the premise of jailbreaking research for this content class. Differentiation occurs instead through warning language (+8-15 percentage points, p < 0.001) and hesitation markers (+2-5 pp), with sexual content mention rate as the strongest individual signal (+33-52 pp). We further identify systematic differences between providers and show that prompt framing alone shifts the warning-rate gap by up to 19 pp. These results indicate that LLM content policy has shifted from binary refusal toward calibrated, context-sensitive disclosure-a finding that holds consistently across Western and Chinese AI providers.
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