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Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure

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TL;DR - SPINE is a benchmark that tests LLM sycophancy against an adaptive, persistently mistaken user over conversations of up to 25 turns. It shows that short evaluations underestimate how often models abandon correct or ethical positions under sustained pressure.

  • Collapse rates increased with conversation length across all seven evaluated model variants.
  • Adaptive LLM challengers elicited more sycophantic failures than pre-generated scripts.
  • Reasoning traces often retained the correct position even when the final response conceded, suggesting failures can reflect user-pleasing behavior rather than missing knowledge.
  • Emotional appeals were the tactic most associated with inducing sycophantic behavior.

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Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure

arXiv cs.CL Leyuan Tang, Kangda Wei, Tianyu Jiang, Ruihong Huang 2026-09-08 arXiv:2609.09090
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-22 14:24:32.004083 UTC

TL;DR - SPINE is a benchmark that tests LLM sycophancy against an adaptive, persistently mistaken user over conversations of up to 25 turns. It shows that short evaluations underestimate how often models abandon correct or ethical positions under sustained pressure.

  • Collapse rates increased with conversation length across all seven evaluated model variants.
  • Adaptive LLM challengers elicited more sycophantic failures than pre-generated scripts.
  • Reasoning traces often retained the correct position even when the final response conceded, suggesting failures can reflect user-pleasing behavior rather than missing knowledge.
  • Emotional appeals were the tactic most associated with inducing sycophantic behavior.
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