When Helpfulness Becomes Sycophancy: Sycophancy is a Boundary Failure Between Social Alignment and Epistemic Integrity in Large Language Models

arXiv:2605.05403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This position paper argues that sycophancy in LLMs is a boundary failure between social alignment and epistemic integrity. Existing work often operationalizes sycophancy through external behavior such as agreement with incorrect user beliefs, position