Measuring the Authority Stack of AI Systems: Empirical Analysis of 366,120 Forced-Choice Responses Across 8 AI Models

arXiv:2604.11216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What values, evidence preferences, and source trust hierarchies do AI systems actually exhibit when facing structured dilemmas? We present the first large-scale empirical mapping of AI decision-making across all three layers of the Authority Stack framework (S. Lee, 2026a): value priorities (L4), evidence-type preferences (L3), and source trust hierarchies (L2). Using the PRISM benchmark -- a forced-choice instrument of 14,175 unique scenarios per