Employees who use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools at work may face a hidden career penalty, with managers less likely to trust them, according to new research titled Psychological Reactions to Subordinates’ LLM Use at Work, conducted by Samuel Meyers and Yochanan E. Bigman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Roman Briker of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany and published in The Leadership Quarterly. The researchers conducted six studies, comprising five incentivised economic experiments and one field study involving academic supervisors. In one experiment, employees who completed a task independently received supervisors' trust 68% of the time, while when employees used AI the likelihood of receiving trust fell to 24%; AI-assisted work was still viewed more favourably than work copied from another person. Lower supervisory trust was associated with poorer perceived performance, lower assessments of organisational citizenship behaviour and reduced promotability. When organisations explicitly encouraged employees to use LLMs, the negative effect on supervisory trust was no longer statistically significant, but the penalty remained when AI use was prohibited or when the organisation had not stated a policy. Neither task importance nor a supervisor's own experience with AI consistently reduced the trust penalty.