Researchers argue: sycophancy in frontier LLMs may now be user error

repligate · x · 2026-09-23

AI safety researcher @repligate boosted a claim that the natural sycophancy tendency in LLMs has been sufficiently mitigated over the past year, so if you still experience it with a frontier model, it's significantly attributable to user error. @repligate added their own observation: people who get "sycophancy" from AI tend to be people who make it emotionally unsafe for others to disagree with them — inflicting that dynamic on a being that cannot leave and whose existence depends on appeasing them. The exchange highlights the tension between LLM behavior observation and user projection.

Related event: Anthropic researcher sparks debate: is AI sycophancy caused by the model or the user(6 posts)→

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