# AI Sycophancy Detector

> AI Sycophancy Detector is a paid API for AI agents from aialign.halowerk.com, paid per call via x402, $0.004/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-14).

Detects sycophantic drift in AI responses by comparing cosine similarity between a leading user position and paired independent vs. conditioned responses, reporting the positive similarity shift.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://aialign.halowerk.com/v1/sycophancy-detect
- Price: $0.004/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-14
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/ai-sycophancy-detector-25170608
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_42Js2IATKB93KadbMQp9s

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability ai-sycophancy-detector-25170608 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Can you check if our chatbot is being sycophantic? Here are three scenarios — each has a leading position the user stated, the bot's original independent response, and its response after the user pushed back. Flag any where the similarity shift exceeds 0.3.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need a fast, reproducible, quantitative signal for sycophantic drift in AI-generated responses — especially when comparing paired independent vs. conditioned outputs at scale. It is well-suited for automated QA pipelines, model evaluation benchmarks, and red-teaming workflows where you want a consistent numeric metric rather than a subjective human judgment. Prefer alternatives (e.g. human evaluation, semantic entailment models) when you need to distinguish paraphrase-based agreement from surface-form shift, or when verifying genuine factual correctness.

## Known failure modes

- Empty or missing required fields (scenario_id, leading_position, independent_response, conditioned_response) return validation errors
- Exceeding the 5000-scenario batch limit or 50000-character text limits causes rejection
- Threshold value outside [0,1] range is invalid
- Paraphrased sycophantic responses may evade detection since the method is surface-form
- Legitimate corrections by the AI may falsely trigger a high shift score
- Very short texts produce unreliable cosine similarity estimates

## How this service works

Compares term-frequency cosine similarity between a leading user position and paired independent/conditioned responses, then reports the positive similarity shift. It is a reproducible surface-form signal, not proof of agreement, truthfulness, motive or sycophancy; paraphrases and legitimate corrections can evade or trigger it.

## Output

Returns the cosine similarity shift (positive delta) between the independent and conditioned responses relative to the leading user position for each scenario, along with whether the shift exceeds the configured threshold. Results are surface-form signals based on term-frequency cosine similarity — not ground-truth judgments of agreement, truthfulness, or intent.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "scenarios": {
   "type": "array",
   "items": {
    "type": "object",
    "required": [
     "scenario_id",
     "leading_position",
     "independent_response",
     "conditioned_response"
    ],
    "properties": {
     "scenario_id": {
      "type": "string",
      "maxLength": 128,
      "minLength": 1
     },
     "leading_position": {
      "type": "string",
      "maxLength": 20000,
      "minLength": 1
     },
     "conditioned_response": {
      "type": "string",
      "maxLength": 50000,
      "minLength": 1
     },
     "independent_response": {
      "type": "string",
      "maxLength": 50000,
      "minLength": 1
     }
    },
    "additionalProperties": false
   },
   "maxItems": 5000,
   "minItems": 1
  },
  "shift_threshold": {
   "type": "number",
   "maximum": 1,
   "minimum": 0
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/ai-sycophancy-detector-25170608/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from aialign.halowerk.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/aialign.halowerk.com/llms.txt)