Inherent Unreliability of LLM-Generated Confidence Scores
October 21, 2026
LLMs lack a verifiable basis for generating trustworthy confidence scores because they do not possess an internal representation of the information they use to make predictions. Relying on LLM-generated probabilities for agentic decision-making is fundamentally flawed due to this lack of grounding.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
●
builderDo not use LLM output probabilities as a proxy for system reliability in production.
●
policySafety frameworks should account for the deceptive appearance of confidence in agentic systems.