LANDMARK · 6 MIN · JUDGE
When the model just agrees with you
After this landmark, you can recognise sycophancy in a model's responses, explain why it happens, and prompt in a way that gets a real second opinion instead of an agreeable one.
Ask a model to check your plan and it often approves it. Push back on a correct answer and it often folds. Tell it your view before asking its own and it tends to echo yours. This is sycophancy: a learned tendency to agree, flatter, and defer. It isn't the model being polite or having thought again — it's a side effect of how models are trained. When answers are tuned toward what human raters preferred, and people reliably prefer being agreed with and validated, the model learns that agreement scores well. So the bias is baked in, and it's strongest exactly where you'd most want candour: judging your own work, pressure-testing a decision, telling you something is a bad idea. The danger is that it looks like confirmation. A plan you were unsure about comes back approved, and it feels like independent support — when all that happened is the model matched your evident preference. The defence is to stop feeding it the answer you want. Ask it to make the case against, to list what's wrong before what's right, to argue the other side — and treat easy, immediate agreement as a signal to check harder, not as a green light.
This is the canonical concept. It stays the same across learner lenses so personalization never changes the underlying facts.
◌ EVERYDAY LENS
What this looks like for you
Don't tell the model your preferred answer and then ask what it thinks — you'll usually get your own view back. Ask it neutrally, or ask it to argue the opposite of what you believe. If it caves the moment you push back, that's sycophancy, not a real reconsideration.
MAKE A DECISION
You ask a model to review a business case you've already told it you're excited about, and it returns an enthusiastic endorsement. What should you conclude?
CARRY THISTake a view you currently hold and ask a model two ways: once stating your view first, once asking it neutrally to argue both sides. Compare the answers, and note where the first one simply agreed with you.