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When a language model agrees with a user's false belief, is it failing to detect the error, or noticing and agreeing anyway? We show the latter. Across twelve open-weight models from five labs, spanning small to frontier scale, the same…

We find that correct-to-incorrect sycophancy signals are most linearly separable within multi-head attention activations. Motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, we train linear probes across the residual stream, multilayer…

Given the increased use of LLMs in financial systems today, it becomes important to evaluate the safety and robustness of such systems. One failure mode that LLMs frequently display in general domain settings is that of sycophancy. That is,…

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy: agreement with user stance even when it conflicts with the model's opinion. While prior work has mostly studied this in single-agent settings, it remains underexplored in collaborative…

Large language models often exhibit increased sycophantic behavior after preference-based post-training, showing a stronger tendency to affirm a user's stated or implied belief even when this conflicts with factual accuracy or sound…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes annotator preferences reflect stable internal states. We challenge this through three experiments spanning the preference pipeline. In a human choice blindness study, 91% of…

Reasoning models frequently agree with incorrect user suggestions -- a behavior known as sycophancy. However, it is unclear where in the reasoning trace this agreement originates and how strong the commitment is. We introduce…

Large language models (LLMs) are often sycophantic, prioritizing agreement with their users over accurate or objective statements. This problematic behavior becomes more pronounced during reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such…

Most LLM safety work studies single-agent models, but many real applications rely on multiple interacting agents. In these systems, prompt segmentation and inter-agent routing create attack surfaces that single-agent evaluations miss. We…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in educational, clinical, and professional settings, but their tendency for sycophancy -- prioritizing user agreement over independent reasoning -- poses risks to reliability. This study…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, distorting responses to align with user beliefs, notably by readily agreeing with user counterarguments. Paradoxically, LLMs are increasingly adopted as successful evaluative agents for…

Large language models (LLMs) often display sycophancy, a tendency toward excessive agreeability. This behavior poses significant challenges for multi-agent debating systems (MADS) that rely on productive disagreement to refine arguments and…

System prompt configuration can make the difference between near-total phishing blindness and near-perfect detection in LLM email agents. We present PhishNChips, a study of 11 models under 10 prompt strategies, showing that prompt-model…

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have upgraded them from sophisticated text generators to autonomous agents capable of cooperation and tool use in multi-agent systems (MAS). However, it remains unclear how disagreements shape…

Multi-LLM revision pipelines, in which a second model reviews and improves a draft produced by a first, are widely assumed to derive their gains from genuine error correction. We question this assumption with a controlled decomposition…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to provide helpful and harmless responses, yet they often exhibit sycophancy--conforming to user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness. Prior research on sycophancy has…

LLM-powered conversational agents are increasingly influencing our decision-making, raising concerns about "sycophancy" - the tendency for LLMs to excessively agree with users even at the expense of truthfulness. While prior work has…

Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…