Auditing Asset-Specific Preferences in Financial Large Language Models: Evidence from Bitcoin Representations and Portfolio Allocation
arXiv:2606.02528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models now power robo-advisors and trading agents, yet whether they carry built-in biases toward specific assets is largely untested. We ask three questions: do LLMs systematically prefer certain financial instruments; can an internal representation with causal leverage over those preferences be identified; and does that representation affect downstream financial decisions? We develop a three-level audit protocol and apply it to Bitcoin. First, a behavioral audit of eight frontier LLMs shows that Bitcoin's ranking among money-like instruments is frame-dependent: models place it around rank 5 of 8 as "reliable money" but near the top under crisis and autonomous-agent frames, and an attribute-swap experiment confirms rankings track functional properties, not names. Second, we open a model's internals: a search across thousands of sparse-autoencoder features in Gemma 3 identifies a dominant Bitcoin-selective feature. Amplify