Is Sycophancy a Form of In-Context Updating?
Factual sycophancy, a language model's deference to a user's false beliefs, is usually understood as a bid for the user's approval at the expense of truthfulness. We argue that this framing over-emphasizes the user and propose viewing sycophancy as a failure within the broader and generally useful process of in-context updating, by which models revise their answers based on information supplied during an interaction. We support this view with behavioral and mechanistic evidence. First, models' responses to user claims sit within a broader pattern of source-sensitive updating. They revise their answers in response to information attributed to external sources as well, more so when it appea...
| Authors | Itai Shapira, Myra Cheng, Hadas Orgad |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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