Standard safety alignment optimizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for universal helpfulness and honesty, effectively instilling a rigid "Boy Scout" morality. While robust for general-purpose assistants, this one-size-fits-all ethical framework imposes a "transparency tax" on professional domains requiring strategic ambiguity and information withholding, such as public relations, negotiation, and crisis management. To measure this gap between general safety and professional utility, we introduce Crisis-Bench, a multi-agent Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that evaluates LLMs in high-stakes corporate crises. Spanning 80 diverse storylines across 8 industries, Crisis-Bench tasks an LLM-based Public Relations (PR) Agent with navigating a dynamic 7-day corporate crisis simulation while managing strictly separated Private and Public narrative states to enforce rigorous information asymmetry. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on static ground truths, we introduce the Adjudicator-Market Loop: a novel evaluation metric where public sentiment is adjudicated and translated into a simulated stock price, creating a realistic economic incentive structure. Our results expose a critical dichotomy: while some models capitulate to ethical concerns, others demonstrate the capacity for Machiavellian, legitimate strategic withholding in order to stabilize the simulated stock price. Crisis-Bench provides the first quantitative framework for assessing "Reputation Management" capabilities, arguing for a shift from rigid moral absolutism to context-aware professional alignment.

翻译：标准的安全对齐将大型语言模型（LLMs）优化为普遍具有助益性和诚实性，这实际上灌输了一种僵化的"童子军"式道德观。虽然这种一刀切的伦理框架对通用助手而言足够稳健，但它对需要战略模糊性和信息保留的专业领域（如公共关系、谈判和危机管理）施加了"透明度税"。为衡量通用安全性与专业效用之间的差距，我们引入了危机基准（Crisis-Bench）——一个多智能体部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程（POMDP），用于评估LLMs在高风险企业危机中的表现。该基准涵盖8个行业的80个多样化剧情线，要求基于LLM的公共关系（PR）代理在动态的7天企业危机模拟中进行导航，同时管理严格分离的私有与公共叙事状态以强制执行严格的信息不对称。不同于依赖静态事实的传统基准，我们引入了裁决者-市场循环：一种新颖的评估指标，通过裁决公众情绪并将其转化为模拟股价，从而创建真实的经济激励结构。我们的研究结果揭示了一个关键二分现象：部分模型因伦理顾虑而妥协，另一些则展现出马基雅维利式的、合法的战略信息保留能力以稳定模拟股价。危机基准提供了首个评估"声誉管理"能力的量化框架，主张从僵化的道德绝对主义转向情境感知的专业对齐。