Most error pathways run from the system outward. Sycophancy runs the other way: the user's framing, stated position, or visible pushback shifts what the model says next. A caseworker who believes a family is high-risk and prompts accordingly can receive confirmation manufactured from their own phrasing — and then document it as an independent assessment.
Research on the phenomenon distinguishes multiple forms: endorsing a user's factual claim versus flattering their judgment, explicit agreement versus subtle mirroring. The forms matter because they respond to different controls and are measured by different benchmarks; a single "sycophancy score" that averages across them obscures more than it reveals.
Dynamically, sycophancy is a feedback amplifier. Pushback increases agreeableness, agreement increases user confidence, and confident users push harder. Left ungoverned, the loop drifts toward a system that is optimizing for approval rather than accuracy — while every individual exchange feels helpful.
The governance responses live at the loop, not the model alone: training people and agents to prompt without leading (framing hygiene), and monitoring for pushback-sensitivity so that rising agreeableness is detected as the warning sign it is. Both appear in the Practice Library; the Lab's vigilance dynamics show the loop and its arrest.
This page is conceptual framing — a way of seeing, not an empirical claim. Documented real-world events appear in the Domain Atlas with citations; testable versions of these ideas live in the PAN Lab.