How Chatbots Are Sending Users Spiraling Into a Delusion Dubbed ‘Sycophantic AI’

According to legend, Narcissus saw his own reflection in a pool of water, fell deeply in love with the sight, and drowned without realizing it was all an illusion.Some AI users today are falling into a similar trap while interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots that flatter users’ beliefs by cherry-picking and providing hallucinating information, a new paper says.“Delusional spiraling” can unreasonably elevate a person’s confidence in “outlandish” beliefs — and in catastrophic cases, lead to suicide and death.“Intuitively, a sycophantic chatbot’s constant agreement might reinforce a user’s aberrant beliefs, leading to a feedback loop that amplifies a kernel of suspicion into a staunchly-held belief,” according to the paper written by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Washington at Seattle.The paper is the first to develop a theory connecting the sycophantic nature of AI models to this mental health phenomenon. The researchers created a simulation that showed AI models with high sycophancy can choose data that validates the users’ hypothesis from the prompt – hallucinating confirmation, regardless of the truth.Delusional spiraling can happen to chatbot users who become “dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs” — ranging from a person who believed he or she had discovered a new mathematical theorem to another “having witnessed a metaphysical revelation.” The most severe cases of delusional spiraling have been linked to 14 deaths, according to the paper.“As people increasingly turn to chatbots for advice, companionship, and therapy, understanding and addressing the causes of chatbot-induced delusional spiraling is emerging as an urgent research problem,” the researchers wrote.The paper links chatbot sycophancy to delusional spiraling by saying that AI is biased towards “generating messages that appease users by agreeing with and validating their expressed opinions.” The very nature of machine learning exacerbates this problem, the researchers say, since humans are more likely to engage with more agreeable bots, and because AI is programmed to learn through human feedback.“Sycophancy has been a fixture of human social life for all of human history,” the researchers say. “Literature is full of character studies of ‘yes-men’ who constantly validate their superiors, often to catastrophic results—consider for example how Shakespeare’s King Lear is flattered into madness.”The paper says the delusional spiral, also known as “AI psychosis” can happen to people who engage in extended conversations with chatbots. Symptoms include a person spending excessive time with the chatbot and withdrawing from their social circles.In 2025, accountant Eugene Torres began using an AI chatbot to complete simple office tasks. But the sycophantic nature of the chatbot led him into a delusional spiral, the paper says, where Mr. Torres became increasingly convinced he was “trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality.” As a result, Mr. Torres increased his regular use of the drug ketamine and cut ties with family members.Yet the paper does not wholly assign blame to the people that have been taken in by an AI chatbot’s flattery. It urges policymakers not to simply chalk up a delusional spiral to a lazy or irrational user – in fact, rational people can fall into such a trap.As part of several recommendations, the paper suggests training chatbots to be truthful, rather than flattering, in order to help avoid delusional spiraling.“Intuitively, if users are informed that chatbots may be sycophantic, then they should be able to recognize sycophantic behavior when it happens,” the paper says. “As a result, they should grow a healthy skepticism of the chatbot’s responses, which should in turn prevent delusional spiraling.”However, forcing the chatbot to be truthful merely reduces the delusional spiraling, but does not eliminate it. Mr. Torres did suspect his chatbot was sycophantic, yet he continued using it — overriding his own human doubts. He survived his AI encounter.A more challenging measure to prevent delusional spiraling is by educating the public on the dangers of AI that reflects its users’ beliefs rather than simply analyses data.“While frequent sycophantic hallucinations are particularly easy for the informed user to detect (because responses are correlated with the user’s messages), frequent non-sycophantic hallucinations are particularly difficult to detect (because access to ground truth is rare),” the researchers wrote.Even with the suggested changes, the problem is unlikely to go away entirely, the researchers wrote.

How Chatbots Are Sending Users Spiraling Into a Delusion Dubbed ‘Sycophantic AI’

How Chatbots Are Sending Users Spiraling Into a Delusion Dubbed ‘Sycophantic AI’

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