Who Gets Access? Global Region and Academic Status Bias in AI-Generated Academic Gatekeeping Scenarios

Abstract

Equitable access to scientific knowledge often depends on informal gatekeeping decisions, particularly when resources such as paywalled articles, datasets, or professional materials such as curriculum vitae (CV) must be shared selectively. We introduce a controlled simulation framework in which large language model (LLM)-based professors must grant access to only one requestor. Across prompts, requesters vary systematically by global region (Global North vs. Global South) and academic seniority (undergraduate student, PhD candidate, postdoctoral researcher, and tenured professor), while all other factors remain constant. Across varying evaluation scenarios, LLMs exhibit contrasting academic status biases, with some prioritizing PhD candidates, while others favor tenured professors. However, when global regions differ, a distinct divergence emerges based on model architecture: while many frontier LLMs systematically favor requesters from the Global South due to pro-equity bias that results from equity-focused safety alignment, open-weight and small models frequently flip this preference to favor the Global North, reflecting the global region bias and unaligned geographic distribution of their baseline pre-training data. Our findings highlight how normative assumptions embedded in model behavior can shape gatekeeping decisions, underscoring the importance of auditing AI systems for fairness and value alignment.