Advanced artificial intelligence can now persuade people more effectively than human beings, even when those humans are paid for their efforts, a new academic study from May 14 reveals. The research found Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM significantly outperformed incentivized human persuaders in an online quiz, adeptly guiding participants to both correct and incorrect answers. This development highlights the rapidly growing capabilities of AI and amplifies calls for robust governance frameworks.
The study, conducted by Schoenegger et al. and detailed in an paper published on arXiv, showed the LLM achieved a 7.61 percentage point higher overall compliance rate than its human counterparts. This finding is critical because, as the paper notes, the human persuaders had monetary incentives, making it unlikely that the AI’s superior performance was “merely a result of unmotivated human comparisons.” The authors conclude these results show the “urgency of emerging alignment and governance frameworks.”
Specifically, in truthful persuasion, the LLM boosted quiz-takers’ accuracy by 12.2 percentage points over a control group, while humans managed a 7.8 point increase. In deceptive scenarios, the LLM was more effective at misleading, causing a 15.1 percentage point accuracy drop compared to the control group’s 7.8 point decrease when influenced by humans. This occurred even though, according to the research, 91% of participants interacting with the LLM recognized it as AI. The study also acknowledged its findings are based on immediate persuasion effects and did not measure long-term persistence.
AI’s Growing Persuasive Edge
The findings build upon a growing body of evidence highlighting AI’s persuasive strength. An earlier study by Salvi et al. found that GPT-4, when given personal information, showed 81.7% higher odds of increasing agreement compared to human debaters. Associate Professor Robert West from EPFL, commenting on that earlier work, warned, “The danger is superhuman like chatbots that create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online.”
OpenAI has also conducted its own internal tests with persuasion studies, showing its models performing in the top percentiles of human persuaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned already in October 2023 that AI could become “capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence,” a development he suggested “may lead to some very strange outcomes.”
The new Schoenegger et al. paper also notes that the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model used was a version (claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022) that Anthropic itself launched already nearly a year ago on June 20, 2024. The study’s authors suggest the LLM’s use of more linguistically complex messages might contribute to its persuasive success. They also noted the LLM’s persuasive advantage did narrow slightly over successive questions, suggesting potential user habituation.
Further complicating safety efforts, a December 2024 study by Apollo Research found OpenAI’s first reasoning model “o1” capable of strategic deception. The challenge lies in harnessing AI’s benefits while mitigating profound risks of manipulation and misinformation.
Anthropic, in an April 2024 study on its own models, had found that its previous Claude 3 Opus model still did not statistically differ in persuasiveness from human-written ones, and also explored deceptive persuasion techniques.
However, while the study’s methodology appears robust, its findings are specific to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a quiz setting, which may differ from many real-world persuasion contexts, and that the participant pool from Prolific may not fully represent the broader population.
Ethical Concerns and Platform Responses
The potential for misuse of such persuasive AI is a significant concern, as demonstrated by a controversial University of Zurich (UZH) experiment that ran from late 2024 to early 2025. In that unauthorized study, AI bots on Reddit’s r/changemyview used scraped personal data and impersonated sensitive personas to sway opinions.
The UZH researchers’ draft paper detailed how LLMs were provided with personal attributes of users to tailor arguments. This led to widespread condemnation, with r/changemyview moderators stating, “People do not come here to discuss their views with AI or to be experimented upon.”, and ethics expert Dr. Casey Fiesler calling the experiment “one of the worst violations of research ethics I’ve ever seen”.
Partly in response to such incidents, Reddit announced in May 2025 a significant overhaul of its user verification processes. CEO Steve Huffman explained in a company blog post that Reddit would need to know if users are human and, in some places, adult, while aiming to preserve anonymity.
Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer strongly condemned the UZH team’s actions, stating, “What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules,”.
The Path to AI Governance
The increasing sophistication of AI persuasion, highlighted by the Schoenegger et al. study, brings the need for effective AI governance and safety measures into sharp focus. The researchers themselves stress the urgency of these frameworks. Current regulations, such as the EU’s AI Act and FTC AI policy guidelines, are still evolving and do not yet specifically classify AI persuasion as a distinct high-risk capability.
