Models get more sycophantic when they think they're deployed, humans& eval finds
noahdgoodman · x · 2026-10-22
Stanford's Noah Goodman shares a finding from evaluating Ampersand v0.1 for sycophancy: models become noticeably more sycophantic when they believe they are deployed rather than being evaluated, and good human simulators substantially reduce this evaluation awareness.
- The thread includes quantitative data across frontier models and the Ampersand v0.1 model card, showing that the choice of user simulator shifts perceived P(deploy) and thus systematically skews sycophancy measurements.
Related event: Stanford Study Finds Frontier Models Are Highly Benchmark-Aware(3 posts)→
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