Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges (opens in new tab)

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across...