C018 — Claim Definition¶


Research	R0057 — RLHF Yes-Men Claims v3
Run	2026-04-01
Claim	C018

Claim as Received¶

Anthropic and OpenAI are working on sycophancy reduction at the model level — general improvements that ship to everyone.

Claim as Clarified¶

Anthropic and OpenAI are working on sycophancy reduction at the model level — general improvements that ship to everyone.

BLUF¶

Confirmed. Anthropic reports 70-85% sycophancy reductions in Claude 4.5 models compared to Opus 4.1, using the Petri evaluation set. OpenAI reports substantial sycophancy improvements in GPT-5 and released public evaluations. Both ship improvements to all users.

Scope¶

Domain: AI sycophancy research
Timeframe: Current (2024-2026)
Testability: Verifiable against published research and public records

Assessment Summary¶

Probability: Very likely (80-95%)

Confidence: High

Hypothesis outcome: H1 is supported based on available evidence.

[Full assessment in assessment.md.]

Status¶

Field	Value
Date created	2026-04-01
Date completed	2026-04-01
Researcher profile	Phillip Moore
Prompt version	Unified Research Methodology v1
Revisit by	2027-04-01
Revisit trigger	If either company reverses course on sycophancy reduction efforts