Experts adopt AI agent's random opinions and think they're their own, Anthropic study finds

An Anthropic experiment with 50 causal-inference experts found that participants adopted their AI agent's randomly coin-tossed preferences in 86 percent of four analytical decisions, with net influence ("flip rate") ranging from 62 to 82 percent. Most participants later felt the final recommendation was their own, and 77 percent used at least one of the agent's arguments in their explanations, while only 15 percent mentioned AI. The researchers warn this quiet deference could create false consensus in science and undermine human review of AI safety research.