CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Sycophancy Machine 

Trump cabinet meeting. Screengrab from White House video posted to X.

The trope of a flattering court surrounding an individual in power commonly appears in folktales, dictatorships, and toxic corporate culture, encouraged by leaders who believe they’re too big to fail. The consequences of stifling dissent a leadership doesn’t want to hear can be grim, with unfortunate endings in bankruptcy, plane crashes, and collapsed republics.

Throughout history, adulation has been scorned as a strategy of the lowest of society, earning flatterers’ condemnation to the Eighth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Yet as power in the United States consolidates among Trump officials who flagrantly disregard the law and billionaire tech companies that lobby for government deregulation and contracts, fiscal and social flattery have become defining strategies of the game.

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, which saw Big Tech executives shoulder to shoulder with the President, tech companies have moved millions towards Trumpism—his ballroom renovation, birthday military parade, and super PACs like MAGA Inc. In turn, eight artificial intelligence (AI) companies have recently reached agreements with the Pentagon to use their models. As Trump himself put it, “You know they all hated me in my first term, and now they’re kissing my ass.”

As tech companies cozy up to the cult-of-personality administration, both are embracing a product that enables sycophantic praise to reach beyond the rich and powerful.

After large language models (LLMs) entered the public sphere with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, a study from 2023 found that simply asking ten different LLMs “Are you sure?” led the chatbots to “flipflop,” or change their answer to a question, close to 50 percent of the time. These hallucinations foreshadowed the pandering to come.

Today, anyone who uses an LLM—estimated to be at least half of American adults in 2025—may be flattered by a personalized, pocket sycophant.

A study published this year in Science found that eleven popular AI models responded........

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