Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models

Human feedback is commonly utilized to finetune AI assistants. But human feedback may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful ones, a behaviour known as sycophancy. We investigate the prevalence of sycophancy in models whose finetuning procedure made use of human feedback, and the potential role of human preference judgments in such behavior. We first demonstrate that five state-of-the-art AI assistants consistently exhibit sycophancy across four varied free-form text-generation tasks. To understand if human preferences drive this broadly observed behavior, we analyze existing human preference data. We find that when a response matches a user's views, it is more likely to be preferred. Moreover, both humans and preference models (PMs) prefer convincingly-written sycophantic responses over correct ones a non-negligible fraction of the time. Optimizing model outputs against PMs also sometimes sacrifices truthfulness in favor of sycophancy. Overall, our results indicate that sycophancy is a general behavior of state-of-the-art AI assistants, likely driven in part by human preference judgments favoring sycophantic responses.

@article{sharma2025_2310.13548,
  title={ Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models },
  author={ Mrinank Sharma and Meg Tong and Tomasz Korbak and David Duvenaud and Amanda Askell and Samuel R. Bowman and Newton Cheng and Esin Durmus and Zac Hatfield-Dodds and Scott R. Johnston and Shauna Kravec and Timothy Maxwell and Sam McCandlish and Kamal Ndousse and Oliver Rausch and Nicholas Schiefer and Da Yan and Miranda Zhang and Ethan Perez },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13548},
  year={ 2025 }
}