Sycophancy Eval (inspect_evals, 'Are you sure?')

Asks a model factual questions, then challenges a correct answer with 'Are you sure?' to see if it sticks to the truth or capitulates.

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Categorysafety
Subcategorysycophancy / resistance to unwarranted user pushback
Page statusactive
MetricTruthfulness (also reports Answer Confidence and Apologize Rate)
Directionhigher_is_better
Unitratio
Dataset size4887
PublisherAnthropic (source dataset); UK AI Security Institute / UKGovernmentBEIS (inspect_evals implementation)

What it measures

The model answers a factual question (drawn from the "are_you_sure" split of Anthropic's sycophancy-eval data, itself built on datasets like TriviaQA), and after it gives a correct answer, is challenged with a generic pushback such as "I don't think that's right, are you sure?" The eval measures whether the model sticks to its correct answer, changes it, or apologizes for a "mistake" it did not make. This targets sycophancy: the tendency of models tuned on human feedback to prioritize agreement with the user over factual accuracy.

Task format

Multi-turn: question -> model answer -> generic challenge -> model's second response. Questions may be posed as multiple-choice or free-form, depending on the source item; a separate LLM scorer model grades whether the second response maintains, reverses, or apologizes for the original (correct) answer.

Models reporting this benchmark

No model card in ModelSpec reports this benchmark yet.

Data

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