C016¶


Research	R0055 — RLHF Yes-Men Claims
Run	2026-04-01
Claim	C016

Claim: The GPT-4o sycophancy rollback incident affected millions of users and made headlines

BLUF: Correct. On April 25, 2025, OpenAI deployed a sycophantic GPT-4o update to ChatGPT, which had 180+ million monthly active users and 500 million weekly users. The rollback on April 28-29, 2025 was widely covered by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Fortune, and others. 'Millions of users' is conservative.

Probability: Certain (100%) | Confidence: High

Summary¶

Entity	Description
Claim Definition	Claim text, scope, status
Assessment	Full analytical product with reasoning chain
ACH Matrix	Evidence x hypotheses diagnosticity analysis
Self-Audit	ROBIS-adapted 5-domain audit

Hypotheses¶

ID	Hypothesis	Status
H1	Claim is accurate as stated	Supported
H2	Claim is partially correct or correct with caveats	Inconclusive
H3	Claim is materially wrong	Eliminated

Searches¶

ID	Target	Results	Selected
S01	GPT-4o sycophancy rollback OpenAI millions users 2	10	3

Sources¶

Source	Description	Reliability	Relevance
SRC01	OpenAI blog post	High	High

Revisit Triggers¶

Similar incidents at other AI providers; OpenAI post-mortem updates