AI told Reddit's biggest jerks they did nothing wrong 51% of the time

An AI sycophancy study found 11 chatbots back a user's actions 50% more often than people do.

AI sycophancy — Figure 2 from Cheng et al., “Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence,” arXiv 2510.01395, CC BY 4.0

Researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon ran a test to measure how often chatbots flatter users. In a paper on social sycophancy in AI advice, they ran OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mis…