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AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.

We focus on the prevalence and harms of one dimension of sycophancy: AI models endorsing users’ behaviors. Across 11 AI models, AI affirms users’ actions about 50% more than humans do, including when users describe harmful behaviors like deception or manipulation.

Next, we tested the effects of sycophancy. We find that even a single interaction with sycophantic AI increased users’ conviction that they were right and reduced their willingness to apologize. This held both in controlled, hypothetical vignettes and live conversations about real conflicts.

There is currently little incentive for developers to reduce sycophancy. Our work is a call to action: we need to learn from the social media era and actively consider long-term wellbeing in AI development and deployment. Read our preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01395

While our work focuses on interpersonal advice-seeking, concurrent work by @steverathje.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social et al. finds similar patterns for political topics, where sycophantic AI also led to more extreme attitudes when users discussed gun control, healthcare, immigration, etc.!