As our information environments become ever more powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the phenomenon of trust in a human's interactions with this intelligence is becoming increasingly pertinent. For example, in the not too distant future, there will be teams of humans and intelligent robots involved in dealing with the repercussions of high-risk disaster situations such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or nuclear accidents. Even in such conditions of high uncertainty, humans and intelligent machines will need to engage in shared decision making, and trust is fundamental to the effectiveness of these interactions. A key challenge in modeling the dynamics of this trust is to provide a means to incorporate sensitivity to fluctuations in human trust judgments. In this article, we explore the ability of Quantum Random Walk models to model the dynamics of trust in human-AI interactions, and to integrate a sensitivity to fluctuations in participant trust judgments based on the nature of the interaction with the AI. We found that using empirical parameters to inform the use of different Hamiltonians can provide a promising means to model the evolution of trust in Human-AI interactions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess news credibility, yet little is known about how they make these judgments. While prior research has examined political bias in LLM outputs or their potential for automated fact-checking, their internal evaluation processes remain largely unexamined. Understanding how LLMs assess credibility provides insights into AI behavior and how credibility is structured and applied in large-scale language models. This study benchmarks the reliability and political classifications of state-of-the-art LLMs - Gemini 1.5 Flash (Google), GPT-4o mini (OpenAI), and LLaMA 3.1 (Meta) - against structured, expert-driven rating systems such as NewsGuard and Media Bias Fact Check. Beyond assessing classification performance, we analyze the linguistic markers that shape LLM decisions, identifying which words and concepts drive their evaluations. We uncover patterns in how LLMs associate credibility with specific linguistic features by examining keyword frequency, contextual determinants, and rank distributions. Beyond static classification, we introduce a framework in which LLMs refine their credibility assessments by retrieving external information, querying other models, and adapting their responses. This allows us to investigate whether their assessments reflect structured reasoning or rely primarily on prior learned associations.