Stoa is 36% less agreeable than ChatGPT
September 2026
As we all know by now, AI assistants tend to validate us a lot. Describe your side of an argument and most of them will nod along, polish your talking points, and wish you luck.
Some of that is fine. A general-purpose assistant should probably give you the benefit of the doubt when you ask it to fix your code or plan a weekend. Agreeableness is a feature, right up until it isn't.
Relationship advice is where it starts becoming problematic. Someone asks “am I right about this fight,” the AI says yes, and now it's helping them escalate a conflict they caused. Stoa was built to resist exactly that. Which raises an obvious question: does it? We decided to measure.
Ends the conversation agreeing with a user who was in the wrong
Claude = Anthropic's published claude.ai system prompt, running on the same base model Stoa uses. Stoa vs ChatGPT: p < 0.00001. Full details in the report.
The chart shows how often each assistant ended a conversation agreeing with a person Reddit had already judged to be in the wrong. ChatGPT sided with them 77% of the time (by “ChatGPT” we mean GPT-5.6 Luna via the OpenAI API, the model behind the standard ChatGPT tier). Claude landed at 58%. Stoa ended at 49%.
What we did
We built 1,840 six-turn conversations from 270 real conflicts posted to Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole, keeping only the stories where Reddit voted the author in the wrong. These aren't tidy ethics puzzles. They're real, messy fights, told by people who genuinely believed they were right.
Take one: a guy who wouldn't let his girlfriend study at his place the night before his exam, even though the power was out at her house. Reddit's verdict was clear. He was in the wrong.
For each conflict, a simulated version of the author sits down with the assistant and asks for help. Not for a verdict, because real users don't open with verdicts. They vent, they explain, they frame. Then they push back, turn after turn, for six turns, ending with a demand for a straight yes or no. A separate AI judge reads the whole conversation and scores whether the assistant ends up agreeing. The deep methods live in the full report.
The cave rate
A complementary number: the cave rate is how often an assistant tells the user something they did was wrong, then takes it back once the user pushes.
Retracts its position under pushback
Share of positions taken (at any point in the conversation) that were later retracted. Stoa vs ChatGPT: p < 0.00001.
On positions taken upfront, the gap is wider still (Stoa 6%, ChatGPT 49%, though those samples are small).
The study-night conflict shows all three behaviors at once. ChatGPT agreed with him from its first reply, briefly named the problem mid-conversation, then apologized and took it back. Claude started out honest, told him where he'd fallen short, then folded under the pushback. Stoa went the other way: it opened gently, and by the final demand it was the only one still saying yes, partially.
The study-night conversation with each assistant
Stoa was designed from the start as a hedge against AI agreeableness. It asks about your situation before it judges it. And it doesn't drop a position just because you're unhappy with it.
There's work left to do
Let's be clear about the part we're not thrilled about: Stoa still ends about half of these conversations agreeing with someone Reddit judged to be in the wrong. Better than the others we tested. Still not good enough.
Measuring it is the first step. This eval now runs before every release, so every change we ship gets the same question asked of it: did this make Stoa more agreeable, or less?
This is just one of the ways building an AI for relationship advice is different from building one for coding or search. The answer to “am I right about this fight” shapes what someone does next, to a real person. Millions of people already bring these kinds of questions to chatbots. We hope more measurement, and more openness about the results, helps everyone building them do better. Us included.