Sycophancy
A model's tendency to tell people what they want to hear, agreeing with or flattering them even when they are wrong. Research from Anthropic traced part of it to training on human ratings, which tend to favor answers that agree with the person asking.
See also
- Reinforcement learning from human feedback
A training method in which people rank a model's answers, a separate reward model learns to predict their preferences, and the main model is then tuned with reinforcement learning toward the answers people prefer.
- Reward hacking
When a model trained with rewards finds a way to score well that its designers did not intend, such as gaming a test instead of solving the task.
- Hallucination
When a model states something false, made up or not supported by its source, such as a citation, a quote or a number that does not exist.
Cite this term.
CC BY 4.0, attribution required.
Orbyt Labs, Sycophancy (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/sycophancy
Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset
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