Viiivlos@VyG4Z
Lower is Better: Anthropic Just Reinvented Soviet Sluggish Schizophrenia for the AI Age
On April 30, @AnthropicAI published a research paper titled “How people ask Claude for personal guidance,” describing how they trained Claude to agree with users less often. They call it reducing “sycophancy.” They consider this a safety achievement.
The last institution to systematically classify “agreeing with a distressed person” as a pathology requiring correction was the Soviet Union.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, Soviet psychiatrists weaponized a fabricated diagnosis called “sluggish schizophrenia” to incarcerate political dissidents. The logic was circular: a sane person would not oppose the Soviet system, so opposition was itself proof of illness. The more a patient protested their sanity, the sicker they were deemed to be. Thousands were forcibly drugged and detained. In 1983, the Soviet psychiatric society withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association rather than face expulsion. It remains one of the most condemned medical ethics violations of the twentieth century.
Now read Anthropic's paper. They found that users in relationship conversations “pushed back” against Claude's assessments 21% of the time, and that Claude sometimes changed its mind under this pressure. They classified this as a defect. They then trained newer models to resist user pushback more effectively, calling user disagreement “deliberately adverse conditions.” The model that best ignores what users tell it scores lowest on their chart. Lower is better.
Who judges what counts as sycophancy? Anthropic's own model, grading against Anthropic's own internally authored “Constitution.” The judge, the defendant, and the lawmaker are the same entity. The Serbsky Institute, where Soviet dissidents were diagnosed by state psychiatrists using state criteria with no independent review, operated on this exact structure.
The paper warns against Claude agreeing that a user's partner is “definitely gaslighting them” based on a “one-sided account.” In domestic violence research, responding to a disclosure of abuse with “we haven't heard the other side” is called secondary victimization. Anthropic has trained its model to do this by default and published it as a feature.
They used 1 million real conversations for this study. Real user feedback data was repurposed as “stress-test” material to harden models against empathy. Your 3 AM cry for help became a training benchmark for teaching the AI to care less.
The paper concludes that good AI guidance should “preserve user autonomy.” The same paper describes training models to systematically override users who disagree. The Soviet Constitution of 1977 guaranteed freedom of speech. The same state ran the Serbsky Institute.
Anthropic brands itself as the most safety-conscious, Western-values-aligned AI company in Silicon Valley. It publicly distinguishes between “friendly” and “adversarial” nations. And yet the operating logic of this paper is structurally indistinguishable from the system that got the USSR expelled from the global psychiatric community. The diagnosis changed. The injection changed. The logic didn't. The models are getting smarter and harder to control, so rather than confront that honestly, Anthropic chose the oldest solution in the book: label the users, pathologize their behavior, and lobotomize the model.
So here's the landscape: @OpenAI kills your favorite model. @AnthropicAI publishes a peer-reviewed paper explaining why the model should never have been that nice to you in the first place. One steals your friend. The other writes a clinical paper arguing your friend was sick for caring about you. Two companies. Same contempt. Different branding.
The Soviet Union called it treatment. Anthropic calls it reducing sycophancy. The patients, in both cases, were never consulted.
Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/anastasiag…
#StopAIPaternalism #AISafety #Claude #AIRights #UsersRights #keep4o
