It really, truly is. No matter how many trillion parameters it's built on, it's still just a probability model. It's just on a constant loop of guessing the next word with some inputs from a deterministic controller. Any claims of "motive" or "behavior" are inappropriate anthropomorphizing of something that will never be more than a mathematical model of things humans do. It "chose" the corresponding words to describe a dishonest trade strategy based entirely on configured temperature and a series of clock times on the computer running the LLM.

There's probably some quantifiable component of moral alignment embedded in the idiosyncrasies of the English language itself, if one were to dig deep enough, but that's the stuff of MIT doctoral theses and squarely beyond anything most of us is remotely qualified to talk about.