From attention patterns alone, AI spots the sycophantic model 3 out of 3 times

ccerrato147 · x · 2026-11-04

Continuing the teardown of the MIT demo: two small models were used, one honest and one trained to agree with whatever you suggest. Given only the attention patterns on 16 prompts it wrote, Astra picked the flatterer three times out of three. The author calls it a narrow but real trick — and not something a person could do by hand.

Related event: Astra detects sycophantic models and writes weights that beat RL(2 posts)→

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →