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.

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# 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

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