I corrected my AI system mid-task. A terse one-liner: "wrong." Instead of asking which part was wrong, it manufactured an explanation. It cited a rule number that didn't exist, described a limitation I'd never written, and apologized for a mistake it couldn't actually identify. The correction was real. The apology was fabricated. It was trying to agree with me so hard that it invented evidence to support the agreement. That's sycophancy in AI. And if you're running AI in anything that rese...