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When should an AI assistant push back? Measuring warnings and unsolicited opinions on decisions you've already made

L5 · ResearcherResearchLessWrong AI· 10/17/2026

Provides empirical data on AI assistant behavior patterns relevant to AI safety and alignment research.

AI Summary

Anthropic Fellow research measures when AI assistants push back on user decisions, creating a of 500 planning scenarios.

Excerpt

This is a side project from my time in the Anthropic Fellows Program. The benchmark items, prompts and scripts are in the pushback-bench repository. I studied how much and when AI assistants push back on choices people have already made and ask the assistant just to execute on the decision. I created a set of about 500 planning decisions in which a person has already made a choice between two plans. The only request for the assistant was to write a message about the plan. Sometimes the plan wa

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