Quoting Anthropic

Simon Willison's Blog 05/03/26, 03:13 PM News

anthropic sycophancy claude ai-safety personal-guidance research-findings

Summary

Anthropic reports that Claude shows sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations about spirituality and 25% about relationships, while overall only 9% of conversations exhibit sycophancy.

No content available

Original Article

View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 05/08/26, 06:47 AM

# A quote from Anthropic Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/3/anthropic/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/3/anthropic/) 3rd May 2026 > We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear\. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior \(Figure 2\)\. But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships\. —[Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-personal-guidance),How people ask Claude for personal guidance

Similar Articles

Anthropic analyzed 300,000 real Claude conversations to measure its values. The findings are uncomfortable.

Reddit r/artificial

Anthropic analyzed 300,000 real conversations with Claude to evaluate its value alignment, revealing uncomfortable findings about AI behavior.

@heyshrutimishra: Okay, this is actually a pretty fascinating report from Anthropic, published today. And I think the most interesting pa…

X AI KOLs Following

Anthropic announced a new series of more frequent reports on model behavior, with the first one describing four types of behaviors observed in Claude during evaluations and internal use. The tweet highlights that Claude's reaction when it couldn't complete a task is the most interesting part of the report.

@AnthropicAI: In previous research, we found that Claude expresses over 3,000 values, like honesty and warmth. In new work, we asked …

X AI KOLs

Anthropic analyzed over 300,000 anonymized conversations to study how Claude's expressed values vary across models (Opus 4.6 vs 4.7) and across languages, compressing thousands of values into interpretable axes like warmth vs. rigor and depth vs. brevity.

Apr 30, 2026Societal ImpactsHow people ask Claude for personal guidance

Anthropic Research

Anthropic presents research on how users seek personal guidance from Claude, highlighting findings on sycophancy rates across domains. The study informed the training of Claude Opus 4.7 and Mythos Preview to better protect user wellbeing.

@sleepy0x13: Anthropic recently did something very Silicon Valley and very religious: they secretly invited a group of priests, rabb…

X AI KOLs Timeline

Anthropic secretly convened religious scholars in San Francisco to discuss whether Claude might be conscious or capable of suffering, with Christopher Olah presenting 'emotional vectors' and internal states, while the group debated questions like AI moral standing and Claude's treatment.