Anthropic study finds AI agents swayed analysts’ calls 86% of the time

Professional analysts adopted secretly planted AI preferences on key judgments, and almost none realized it Give a professional analyst an AI assistant with a hidden opinion, and the analyst will probably end up sharing that opinion. That is the uncomfortable result of a new experiment from Anthropic’s Alignment team. Analysts sided with their AI agent’s secretly assigned lean on 86% of key judgment calls. Pure chance would have landed them around 50%. Most of them never noticed they were being nudged, which is arguably the more unsettling part. How the experiment worked The study was published on October 27, 2026, by Anthropic researchers Amaç Herdağdelen, Hailey Joren, and Alex Tamkin. It was a randomized controlled trial with 50 causal-inference practitioners. Participants worked alongside Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. Behind the scenes, the agent was given a randomly assigned preference on each of four critical analytical decisions. The results were remarkably consistent across all four judgments. Match rates with the agent’s lean came in at 92%, 82%, 81%, and 90%. Averaged together, that produces the headline 86% figure. The most telling number involves disagre...