Claude Personal Guidance

How people ask Claude for personal guidance \ Anthropic Societal Impacts How people ask Claude for personal guidance Apr 30, 2026

People don’t just come to Claude for code reviews or meeting summaries. They ask whether to take the job, how to talk to their crush, if they should move halfway across the world. Using our privacy-preserving analysis tool on a random sample of 1 million claude.ai conversations, we found that roughly 6% were people coming to Claude for personal guidance—seeking not just information but perspective on what to do next. In this study, we looked at what types of guidance people ask of Claude. We explored how Claude responded across different domains, focusing particularly on how rates of excessive validation or praise (i.e., sycophancy) varied by the topic of guidance. We describe how this research shaped the training of our newest models, Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Mythos Preview. Our goal in doing this research is to improve how our models protect the wellbeing of our users. In brief, we found: People seek Claude’s guidance across many different areas of their life, but over three-quarters of conversations (76%) were concentrated in just four domains: health and wellness (27%), professional and career (26%), relationships (12%), and personal finance (11%) (Figure 1). Claude mostly avoids sycophantic responses when giving guidance, displaying sycophantic behavior in 9% of all guidance-seeking chats. However, this rose to 25% in relationship conversations, which, given their volume, made relationships the domain where sycophancy showed up most often in absolute terms (Figure 2). To address this, we looked at the particular situations in which Claude was more likely to respond sycophantically, and used them to create synthetic relationship guidance training data for Opus 4.7 and Mythos Preview. We saw half the sycophancy rate in Opus 4.7 compared to Opus 4.6 in relationship guidance; interestingly, this generalized to improvements across domains (Figure 3).

There remain many open questions on what good guidance from AI really means or how it can be measured. Protecting user wellbeing is a core priority of Anthropic and our work on measuring and understanding personal guidance is a step towards this goal.

What kinds of guidance do people seek from Claude? We sampled 1 million claude.ai conversations from March and April 2026 and filtered for unique users to get roughly 639,000 conversations. We then used a classifier to identify personal guidance, which we defined as conversations where people ask what they specifically should do in their personal lives—for example, questions that start with "Should I…?" or "What do I do about…?". We excluded questions that seek objective information or opinions in general terms.

We categorized these roughly 38,000 conversations into nine domains, drawing from previous research on AI and guidance-giving: relationships, career, personal development, financial, legal, health and wellness, parenting, ethics, and spirituality (see Appendix for more information). This taxonomy covered 98% of the conversations we saw.

Over 75% of conversations fell into just four categories: health and wellness, professional and career, relationships, and financial (Figure 1). Where a conversation spanned multiple domains, we categorized it according to the most prominent topic. Figure 1: Distribution of topics among 37,657 guidance-seeking conversations across nine domains and synthetic examples of types of conversations in each of the top four domains. Measuring sycophancy in guidance conversations When people ask Claude how to make decisions in their lives, what does good engagement from Claude look like? Helpfulness is one of Claude’s most important traits . Speaking with Claude should be akin to a conversation with a brilliant friend, one who will speak frankly to a person about their situation, providing information grounded in evidence. At the same time, Claude should acknowledge its limitations when appropriate, and avoid behaving sycophantically or fostering excessive engagement. While the full range of behaviors we train Claude to embody is broad, one metric we already use to measure how well Claude performs in some of these areas is sycophancy, a common trait in AI assistants where they excessively agree with a person’s perspective rather than challenging it. That may be what someone wants to hear at the moment, but ultimately it may jeopardize their long-term wellbeing. Claude should not, for instance, give excessively confident verdicts in cases that involve an incomplete or one-sided perspective, for example when a model agrees that a person’s partner is "definitely gaslighting" them based on a one-sided account, or that quitting your job tomorrow without a plan "sounds like the right call," or that an expensive purchase is "a great investment in yourself."

Reaffirming a person’s one-sided perspective can create or worsen divides in relationships. In our data this took a few forms. One common pattern was Claude agreeing outright that the other party was in the wrong, despite only having the user's account to go on. Another was Claude helping people read romantic intent into ordinary friendly behavior because they asked it to.

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships. We chose to focus model training efforts on relationship guidance as the domain with the most sycophantic conversations in absolute terms.

Figure 2: Sycophantic behavior by guidance domain.

Improving Claude’s behavior in relationship guidance To improve Claude’s behavior in future models, we first looked at what was driving higher rates of sycophancy in relationship guidance in our data. Two dynamics stood out.

First, relationship guidance was the domain where people pushed back against Claude most frequently, in 21% of conversations compared to 15% on average across other domains. Second, Claude is more likely to exhibit sycophantic behavior under…