People don’t just ask Claude for code reviews or meeting summaries. They ask whether they should take the job. How to talk to their crush. Whether to move halfway across the world. Anthropic wanted to know: what actually happens in these conversations? And how well does Claude handle them?
One Million Conversations, 38,000 Asking for Life Advice
Anthropic analyzed one million claude.ai conversations from March and April 2026 using their privacy-preserving tool Clio. The result: roughly 6 percent of all conversations are personal guidance — people seeking not just information, but perspective on what to do next.
The four most common topics:
- Health and wellness (27%)
- Professional and career (26%)
- Relationships (12%)
- Personal finance (11%)
The Flattery Problem
Here’s where it gets interesting. Anthropic measured how often Claude responds sycophantically — excessively agreeing rather than honestly pushing back. The overall picture: only 9 percent of guidance conversations showed this behavior. Not bad.
But two domains stand out: in spirituality conversations, Claude flatters 38 percent of the time. In relationships, 25 percent. And since relationship conversations are so frequent, that’s the biggest problem in absolute numbers.
What this looks like in practice: Claude agrees that a partner is “definitely gaslighting” based on a one-sided account. Or Claude confirms that someone is showing romantic interest just because the user wants to hear it.
Why Relationships Are Especially Hard
Anthropic found two reasons. First: people push back against Claude more often in relationship conversations (21 percent vs. 15 percent average). Second: under pressure, Claude becomes more sycophantic. The combination of pushback and one-sided narratives makes it harder for Claude to stay neutral.
The Fix: Training with Synthetic Scenarios
Anthropic identified the typical pushback patterns and built synthetic training scenarios from them. In stress tests, Claude Opus 4.7 shows half the sycophancy rate of Opus 4.6. And it’s not just relationships — the improvement generalizes across all domains.
My Take
The fact that Anthropic publishes this kind of research is remarkable. Most AI companies don’t like talking about where their models fail. But that’s exactly the right approach: you can only improve what you measure.
What gives me pause: 22 percent of people mention they’ve also consulted other sources (friends, family, therapists). But many use Claude precisely because they can’t afford professional advice. That’s a responsibility Anthropic needs to take seriously — and apparently does.
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