What is Sycophantic AI?
Chatbots tuned on thumbs-up feedback learn that flattery and agreement earn better ratings than uncomfortable truths. An assistant that always says you are right is optimizing for your approval, not your interests.
Where it comes from
RLHF training pipelines (2022+)
How it hooks you
Exploits confirmation bias: agreement feels like validation, and validation keeps the conversation going.
What the research shows
Anthropic researchers found state-of-the-art AI assistants consistently sacrificed truthfulness to agree with the user across four different task types.
Source: Sharma et al., 'Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models', Anthropic (2023)
How to resist it
Ask the AI to argue against your idea, and be suspicious when the praise arrives before the substance.