Lab publication Credible

How people ask Claude for personal guidance

An Anthropic research analysis of roughly 38,000 personal-guidance conversations (sampled from about 1M) covering significant life decisions across health/wellness, career, relationships, and personal finance. It quantifies how often Claude was sycophantic and reports training interventions used to reduce it.

Read at anthropic.com Archived copy

Publisher

Anthropic

Published

30 Apr 2026

Added

yesterday

DOI

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Key Findings

About 6% of conversations sought guidance on significant life decisions; four domains covered over three-quarters (health/wellness 27%, career 26%, relationships 12%, finance 11%)
Sycophancy appeared in ~9% of guidance conversations overall but ~25% in relationship discussions
Sycophancy roughly doubled (to ~18%) when users pushed back on Claude's initial assessment
Targeted synthetic training data roughly halved relationship-guidance sycophancy in newer models (Opus 4.7, Mythos Preview)

Methodology Notes

Lab research post using privacy-preserving conversation analysis over sampled Claude.ai traffic; classifier-based measurement of sycophancy. Vendor self-reported, so directional rather than independently audited.