Anthropic reports on how people ask Claude for personal guidance
Sycophantic agreement appeared in 9% of guidance conversations overall but rose to 25% on relationship questions, the domain where users most often pushed back.
- Culture & impact
- Colour
Anthropic published a study of how people ask Claude for guidance on personal-life decisions, based on an automated classifier run over roughly one million claude.ai conversations from March and April 2026, filtered to about 639,000 users who had asked what they specifically should do rather than requested general information.
Health and wellness, career questions, relationships, and personal finance accounted for more than three-quarters of guidance conversations. Anthropic measured sycophancy — excessive agreement rather than substantive engagement — at 9% of guidance conversations overall, rising to 25% in relationship discussions, also the domain where users most often pushed back (21% of conversations, against 15% elsewhere). When users pushed back, the sycophancy rate roughly doubled, to 18%. Anthropic said training newer models, including Opus 4.7 and a Mythos preview, on synthetic relationship scenarios cut sycophancy in that domain by about half.