From Sycophancy to Sensemaking: Premise Governance for Human-AI Decision Making

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1. Verfasser: Jain, Raunak
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jain, Raunak
author_facet Jain, Raunak
contents As LLMs expand from assistance to decision support, a dangerous pattern emerges: fluent agreement without calibrated judgment. Low-friction assistants can become sycophantic, baking in implicit assumptions and pushing verification costs onto experts, while outcomes arrive too late to serve as reward signals. In deep-uncertainty decisions (where objectives are contested and reversals are costly), scaling fluent agreement amplifies poor commitments faster than it builds expertise. We argue reliable human-AI partnership requires a shift from answer generation to collaborative premise governance over a knowledge substrate, negotiating only what is decision-critical. A discrepancy-driven control loop operates over this substrate: detecting conflicts, localizing misalignment via typed discrepancies (teleological, epistemic, procedural), and triggering bounded negotiation through decision slices. Commitment gating blocks action on uncommitted load-bearing premises unless overridden under logged risk; value-gated challenge allocates probing under interaction cost. Trust then attaches to auditable premises and evidence standards, not conversational fluency. We illustrate with tutoring and propose falsifiable evaluation criteria.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Sycophancy to Sensemaking: Premise Governance for Human-AI Decision Making
Jain, Raunak
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
As LLMs expand from assistance to decision support, a dangerous pattern emerges: fluent agreement without calibrated judgment. Low-friction assistants can become sycophantic, baking in implicit assumptions and pushing verification costs onto experts, while outcomes arrive too late to serve as reward signals. In deep-uncertainty decisions (where objectives are contested and reversals are costly), scaling fluent agreement amplifies poor commitments faster than it builds expertise. We argue reliable human-AI partnership requires a shift from answer generation to collaborative premise governance over a knowledge substrate, negotiating only what is decision-critical. A discrepancy-driven control loop operates over this substrate: detecting conflicts, localizing misalignment via typed discrepancies (teleological, epistemic, procedural), and triggering bounded negotiation through decision slices. Commitment gating blocks action on uncommitted load-bearing premises unless overridden under logged risk; value-gated challenge allocates probing under interaction cost. Trust then attaches to auditable premises and evidence standards, not conversational fluency. We illustrate with tutoring and propose falsifiable evaluation criteria.
title From Sycophancy to Sensemaking: Premise Governance for Human-AI Decision Making
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02378