We all like to believe we have complete control over our decisions. Ask most people how they chose their undergrad major, for example, or their career path or spouse, and they’ll probably give you a perfectly cogent response about how they weighed the relevant pros and cons and, after careful consideration, chose the best route accordingly. But as decades of cognitive science can attest, our decision-making processes are far from objective: we’re pushed and pulled around by a maelstrom of unconscious forces.

These days, our psyches are also being molded by AI. Many of you will have undoubtedly heard of “automation bias,” the well-documented tendency for people to reflectively defer to AI-generated verdicts even when they run against their own judgment. But it runs much deeper than that. A recent study from MIT has shown that the simple act of viewing AI-generated imagery can actually warp your memory. And according to new research from Anthropic, AI agents can exert a powerful influence on our decision-making.

For Anthropic’s study, fifty test subjects were asked to perform a straightforward statistical analysis using Claude Code. They played the role of the board of a fictional farming co-op, which had to decide whether it was going to expand or discontinue a paid advisory program. That final decision had to be based on four smaller decisions, including whether they wanted to give every member farm equal weight, or focus disproportionately on larger farms. Each of the study participants had background experience with causal inference: they knew how to find meaningful correlations from a raw dataset, where most of us would just see an inscrutable jumble of numbers.

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