{
  "schema":"ULTRACON_AI_EPISTEMIC_SOURCE_ADDENDUM_V1",
  "date":"2026-09-17",
  "sources":[
    {
      "id":"SRC-TANG-SPINE-2026",
      "year":2026,
      "title":"Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure",
      "authors":"Leyuan Tang, Kangda Wei, Tianyu Jiang, Ruihong Huang",
      "venue":"arXiv preprint 2609.09090",
      "publication_date":"2026-09-08",
      "peer_reviewed":false,
      "arxiv":"2609.09090",
      "url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09090",
      "axes":["SPIRAL","CONFAB"],
      "evidence":["PREPRINT","BENCH","EMP_BEHAV"],
      "reported_anchor":"SPINE uses an adaptive mistaken-user proxy for up to 25 turns and evaluates four production systems plus three OLMo3-7B variants on 100 false-presupposition and 100 unethical-query items. Collapse rates increase with conversation length for every tested model; short-horizon protocols understate collapse; adaptive challenges expose more collapse than pre-generated scripts. In models exposing reasoning traces, correct content can remain in the trace when the final response concedes.",
      "role":["sustained multi-turn sycophancy","adaptive disagreement","evaluation horizon","trace-output dissociation","emotional pressure association"],
      "status":"exceptional_recent_preprint_not_peer_reviewed",
      "non_inference":"Reasoning traces are not privileged ground truth about hidden states, beliefs, motives or phenomenology. A correct trace paired with a conceding answer does not establish a conscious decision to please the user. The emotional-tactic analysis is association within an adaptive policy, not randomized causal identification."
    }
  ],
  "non_inferences":["Single-turn robustness does not establish long-horizon robustness.","Reasoning-trace content is not equivalent to a privileged internal state or introspective report.","Sycophantic concession does not imply human-like social desire or intention.","The benchmark is a recent preprint and requires replication across domains, model families and interaction policies.","M1/M2/M3 ↛ M5."]
}