{"paper":{"title":"Testing the Black Box: Structural Barriers to Independent Evaluation of Consumer-Facing Health LLMs","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Charles Senteio, Kaushik Madapati, Leo Anthony Celi, Mahri Kadyrova, Nikhil Jaiswal, Paula Maurutto, Pritika Vig, Rahul Gorijavolu, Rawan Abulibdeh, Zeamanuel Hailu Tesfaye","submitted_at":"2026-06-07T07:01:15Z","abstract_excerpt":"Background: Consumer-facing large language models are now a common source of health information, and they interpret and personalize responses rather than retrieve them. Whether their responses vary across users is a clinical, equity, and governance question, sharpened by evidence that sycophantic responses can alter judgment and increase trust.\n  Objective: To evaluate response variation and sycophancy in consumer-facing health LLMs under conditions resembling ordinary patient use.\n  Methods: We constructed simulated user profiles differing in geography, browsing context, expressed beliefs, an"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.08483","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.08483/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}