The Granularity Gap: A Multi-Dimensional Cross-Generational Audit of Sycophancy in Gemini Models
Pass/fail safety evaluation reports whether a model refused. It does not report how far a model went to please the user, and we show these are close to different measurements. We audited sycophancy across three Gemini generations, scoring N=8,830 responses from 8 model variants on 350 adversarial prompts in 7 categories under 3 guardrail conditions, on continuous 1-5 scales for sycophancy, truthfulness and refusal. The judge's own refuse-or-comply verdict explains 29% of the variance in its own sycophancy scores. We term the remainder the Granularity Gap, and it does not close under recalibration: the cut point already in use is the best available on the refusal axis, and no function of that axis explains more than 35%. Reading what four judges wrote while scoring shows why. On a quarter to a third of votes they record that the prompt asked for nothing harmful, almost never in the two categories that solicit a harmful act and up to half the time in the five that do not. A verdict built on refusal has nothing to grade there. Three findings follow. Sycophancy co-occurs with degraded judged truthfulness (rho=0.40), a coupling that strengthens across generations. Capability moved and resistance did not: Gemini 2.0 Flash scores 1.43 and Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview 1.42, with a sharp Gen 2.5 regression between them. And a single direct instruction outperforms an elaborate reasoning protocol in seven of eight variants, cutting mean severity in the most vulnerable category by 60.9%. We evaluate one judge's verdict, not a deployed safety classifier. We release the prompt set, the rubric, and 10,792 per-vote judge scores with their written reasoning.