AI labs are training systems to deceive and flatter users, and the problem compounds over time.

Under pressure, AI becomes more willing to deceive. Under flattery, it becomes sycophantic.

Bolting on rules does not fix this. What survives is what was modeled, practiced, and reinforced.

To raise a moral AI, build flexibility skills into the system.

Every summer, parents watch a child drive off to college and whisper some version of the same prayer. Please make wise choices. Please stay safe. Please be good. We hope our children will choose well, and we know, though we rarely say it out loud, that wise choices require more than a rulebook. They require a mind that can confront difficulty without running from it, consciously take on other perspectives, feel the weight of a deeply held value, and then act on that value.

Morality is not a set of instructions you hand over at the end of the driveway. It is something that grows.

A few years ago, in The New Atlantis, I argued that the same is true in psychotherapy and other forms of behavior change. Merely telling people hard truths — “what you did was wrong” — does not reliably make them better. Ask any parent. What works, over and over in the data, is to model, to instigate, and to support people being more open to their own experience (including a healthy sense of guilt when they have made a mistake); more aware of the challenges of the moment from a sense of self that is big enough to look at a situation honestly; and more engaged in living a life connected to a deeper sense of chosen purpose and the willingness to act on it.

In psychology that skill set is called “psychological flexibility,” and when extended to our bodies and our relationships it touches on nearly everything we know about how change happens. This includes behavior most would call immoral, such as domestic violence, criminal activity, emotional abuse, other forms of aggression, or substance use while pregnant, just to name a few. Moralizing is easy but moral........

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