Sycophancy as a Multilingual Alignment Failure: How Safety Degrades Across Languages, Topics, and Models

Abstract

Safety-aligned large language models often exhibit sycophancy, which is the tendency to affirm users' opinions regardless of factual accuracy. Although well-studied in English, its manifestation in other languages remains largely unexamined, leaving billions of non-English speakers potentially vulnerable to model-validated misinformation. We present the first large-scale, multi-model evaluation of cross-lingual sycophancy, benchmarking \textbf{six instruction-tuned models} across \textbf{1.1 million instances} spanning \textbf{38 languages} and \textbf{33 topic categories}. We identify a consistent resource-tier effect: sycophancy rates spike sharply in low-resource and zero-shot language settings. Critically, this degradation is topic-agnostic, as models fail uniformly across both benign and safety-critical prompts, offering no additional protection where it is most needed. We further identify tokenizer fertility as a structural driver of this alignment collapse. Collectively, our results demonstrate that prevailing alignment methodologies generalize poorly beyond high-resource languages, underscoring the urgent need for equitable multilingual safety techniques.