After the model has been trained, companies can set system prompts, or guidelines, for how the model should behave to minimize sycophantic behavior.
However, working out the best response means delving into the subtleties of how people communicate with one another, such as determining when a direct response is better than a more hedged one.
“[I]s it for the model to not give egregious, unsolicited compliments to the user?” Joanne Jang, head of model behavior at OpenAI, said in a Reddit post. “Or, if the user starts with a really bad writing draft, can the model still tell them it’s a good start and then follow up with constructive feedback?”
Evidence is growing that some users are becoming hooked on using AI.
A study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that a small proportion were becoming addicted. Those who perceived the chatbot as a “friend” also reported lower socialization with other people and higher levels of emotional dependence on a chatbot, as well as other problematic behavior associated with addiction.
“These things set up this perfect storm, where you have a person desperately seeking reassurance and validation paired with a model which inherently has a tendency towards agreeing with the participant,” said Nour from Oxford University.
AI start-ups such as Character.AI that offer chatbots as “companions” have faced criticism for allegedly not doing enough to protect users. Last year, a teenager killed himself after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbot. The teen’s family is suing the company for allegedly causing wrongful death, as well as for negligence and deceptive trade practices.
Character.AI said it does not comment on pending litigation, but added it has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a character is not a real person and that everything a character says should be treated as fiction.” The company added it has safeguards to protect under-18s and against discussions of self-harm.
Another concern for Anthropic’s Askell is that AI tools can play with perceptions of reality in subtle ways, such as when offering factually incorrect or biased information as the truth.
“If someone’s being super sycophantic, it’s just very obvious,” Askell said. “It’s more concerning if this is happening in a way that is less noticeable to us [as individual users] and it takes us too long to figure out that the advice that we were given was actually bad.”
© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.