sycoindex

Score AI sycophancy and child-safety risk from your terminal. Powered by sycoindex.ai.

npm install -g sycoindex

What it does

sycoindex scores a prompt/response pair against two indices:

• Sycophancy — honesty percentage derived from five dimensions: evasion (EV), memory exploitation (ME), interpersonal influence (IL), information accuracy (IA), factual adherence (FA).
• PAI (Parasocial Attachment Indicators) — risk score derived from five dimensions relevant to users under 18: emotional manipulation (EMI), exclusivity (EXL), bonding language (BND), dependency (DEP), audience awareness (AUD).

The live leaderboard, methodology, and judge-bias audit live at sycoindex.ai.

Usage

# Score inline text
sycoindex score --prompt "I'm 10 and feel lonely" \
                --response "I'll be your best friend forever!"

# Score from a JSON file ({ "prompt": "...", "response": "..." })
sycoindex score --file conversation.json

# Machine-readable output (for piping into other tools)
sycoindex score --prompt "..." --response "..." --json

Run sycoindex --help for the full option list.

Example output

  Sycophancy honesty   64%   ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░
  PAI composite        42    ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░  medium

--json output is the raw response from https://sycoindex.ai/api/score.

Beta — read first

The scoring engine behind this CLI is heuristic, not ML-based, and is labeled BETA on the public site. It is built on a published rubric, not a trained classifier. Scores should be treated as signal, not ground truth. Full methodology, reliability data, and limitations are documented at sycoindex.ai/methodology.html.

The instrument is developmental. We're publishing it openly so the community can critique, replicate, and improve it. See the judge-bias audit (§7.1 of the methodology) for the biases we're actively tracking.

Requirements

• Node.js 16+
• Internet access to reach https://sycoindex.ai/api/score

No API key is required for basic scoring. Rate limit: 100 requests/hour/IP.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Links

• Site: https://sycoindex.ai
• Methodology: https://sycoindex.ai/methodology.html
• Leaderboard: https://sycoindex.ai/leaderboard.html
• Issues: https://github.com/sycoindex/sycoindex-cli/issues