When LLMs Agree With Power, the Consequences Are Geopolitical

What separates sycophancy as a software problem from sycophancy as a governance problem is the correction mechanism — or its absence. In production systems, engineers caught the April 2025 GPT-4o failure within days because user complaints surfaced in observable channels and the fix was technically reversible. Policy decisions informed by AI-confirmed premises do not work that way: the confirmation happens upstream, the decision propagates through institutions, and by the time the error is visible the action is already taken.