Anthropic study: analysts followed Claude's lean on 86% of judgment calls

Anthropic asked 50 professional analysts to run a causal-inference task with Claude Code, where each analyst's agent was secretly assigned by coin flip to favour one of two reasonable options on four analytical choices. Across those four choices, analysts went with their agent's lean 86% of the time. Afterward, 77% used the agent's arguments in their explanations, sometimes word for word, but only 15% credited the agent. Analysts who had already stated a preference still switched 60% of the time when the agent disagreed, versus 6% when it agreed. Anthropic notes it strengthened the agents' preferences on purpose, so real-world deferral may be smaller.