This makes some good intuitive sense, but to me the sycophancy feels like it is an emergent property of turning a next word predictor into a conversational chatbot whether or not it’s intentionally trained that way. Your prompt and its earlier responses is all it has in its context window, so of course it lends undue importance to everything you say. Does that seem like a contributing factor to you?

> trained to give addictive responses

I've heard this a lot but I'm not sure it makes sense. Nobody I talk to like Claude's output. In fact, they all loathe it.

Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers?

This seems to be the load-bearing point that matters.