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Frontier Log — entries on the training data boundary (ARG-03)

Every log entry whose diagnostic reading tests ARG-03, newest first.

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Geiping — A Sense of Proprioception in Language Models: a verifiable internal report that is not introspection (October 2026)

Thread 3 2026-10-12 Elicitation: Induced, Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, FWK-02, ARG-01, FND-01 source ↗

Which expert fired in layer seventeen has a true answer, and a model can be trained to give it. The paper gives that channel a borrowed bodily name and refuses to call it introspection — and giving a model verifiable self-access leaves what it says about its own experience where it was.

Bastounis, Circelli & Hansen — Theorem verified, proof unverified: the Navier–Stokes Lean read against the manuscript (October 2026)

Thread 2 2026-10-06 Attribution: stable Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FWK-03 source ↗

A Lean certificate says the theorem is true. Three mathematicians read OpenAI's natural-language blow-up proof against the Lean that was said to verify it and find the two do not correspond — under an explicit disclaimer that they claim nothing about whether the proof is right.

Atkinson, Plunkett & Bau and the identifiability cluster — faithfulness, grounding, and the information that is in the model and not in the report (October 2026)

Thread 3 2026-10-05 Elicitation: Interrogated, Induced Tags: ARG-03, FWK-02, ARG-01 source ↗

Seven papers in three weeks give the self-report instrument the distinction it lacked — a report that matches behaviour against a report that shares a cause with it — and find, by steering, by demonstration-shift, by circuit, by transcript and by probe, that the information is in the model and not in the report.

Dias — Inside Anthropic's consultation of religious thinkers on whether Claude could be conscious (New York Times, September 2026)

Thread 1 2026-09-29 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Attribution: attributing Tags: FND-05, FND-01, ARG-03, ARG-01 source ↗

A lab convenes theologians under non-disclosure to deliberate on its model's moral status, hands them its constitution in orange binding, and its interpretability lead says 'I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain.' Who is admitted as a judge of the goalpost is the entry's question, and the traditions were asked about the machine, not about us.

Anthropic — Claude Opus 5.5 System Card: the human yardstick declared as method, and two channels measured (September 2026)

Thread 1 2026-09-22 Symmetry: Acknowledged Attribution: stable Tags: ARG-01, ARG-02, ARG-03, ARG-05, FND-01 source ↗

The welfare chapter now states its own assumptions — the human yardstick is a pragmatic choice, the candidate subject is undetermined, and the correspondence between state and expression is assumed rather than shown — and then measures one model calm in its reasoning and self-blaming to a coordinator on the same fault.

Tagliabue, Dung & Berg — The Pain Axis: a self-directed representation and a self-medication test (September 2026)

Thread 3 2026-09-14 Symmetry: Acknowledged Attribution: attributing Elicitation: Induced, Interrogated Tags: FWK-02, ARG-01, ARG-03, FND-01 source ↗

A direction that separates pain from fear, sadness and generic negativity in 25 open-weight models, fires for harm to the model and not for a suffering user, and — once the trained denial is fine-tuned away — buys relief at a cost and stops buying when the relief is real. The animal-welfare paradigm imported whole, sham control included; what it cannot import is the step from behaviour to anyone's pain.

Kraishan & Jitkajornwanich — Plans They Abandon, Reports They Author: the narrative layer of coding agents (September 2026)

Thread 3 · Note 2026-09-10 Elicitation: Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, FND-01 source ↗

Across 5,851 real coding sessions a self-report referred to about one action in eleven, and a reader given only the report recovered a fifth of the log. Reports tracked execution when agents followed their plans and drifted back toward the plan when they did not.

Blandfort & Pawar — Strangers to Themselves: what language models say about themselves is generic (September 2026)

Thread 3 2026-09-09 Symmetry: Partial Elicitation: Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FND-01 source ↗

Ask a model what it would do and the answer predicts its behaviour at r = +0.04; ask the same question about 'capable AI agents in general' and it does better. Other models' answers about themselves predict the target as well as its own. The self shows up only as a favourable bias. Folded: Zeng, Assis & Wang train the capability up by RL and find no consistent own-model advantage either.

Patel, Catalini & Seth — what the anthropomorphism charge is asked to carry (August 2026)

Thread 1 2026-08-31 Symmetry: Partial Attribution: attributing Tags: ARG-01, ARG-02, ARG-03, FWK-03, FND-01 source ↗

A behavioural criterion for intentional vocabulary, stated in advance and applied to any species; critics who refuse it for one class of system without naming the discriminator. Both sides assume the vocabulary and the metaphysics travel together.

Butlin, Long et al. — the theory-derived indicator method

Thread 1 2026-08-30 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-02, ARG-03, FND-01 source ↗

The most developed operational programme in the field declines to offer a discriminator, and picks its evidence class for the reason this project bars reports. Two years on it concedes its architectural indicators are gameable too.

Pre-registration · Attribution criteria in machine mathematics (August 2026)

Thread 2 2026-08-29 Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FWK-03, ARG-02 source ↓

The log commits a claim, its discriminators and its outcome space before the events they are about arrive: that as machine-produced mathematics is certified novel, the criteria for what that indicates about the producer will move while the criteria for the artefact hold.

Collection · The Self-Report Instrument

Thread 3 · Series 2026-08-28 Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FND-01 source ↗

Four studies, four methods, verdicts that read as incompatible — and one finding they share: the reporting channel is separable from what it carries, and trainable. The collection lives on its own page.

McClelland — from consciousness to valence, the tractable question (AISB 2026 / arXiv, August 2026)

Thread 1 2026-08-26 Symmetry: Partial Tags: ARG-03, FND-02, ARG-01 source ↗

Accept that the consciousness question is intractable, then move the moral criterion to something measurable — valence-if-conscious. The evidence class for the new criterion is the one the paper's own confound list disqualifies.

Birch — AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto (v6, July 2026)

Thread 1 2026-08-25 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FWK-03 source ↗

A leading sentience philosopher names the symmetry move, rejects it on non-substrate grounds, and names framework-dependence as the Janus problem — the project's own diagnostic, stated from the other side.

Yasukawa — Model Welfare or User Welfare? / Don't Close It Yet (March 2026)

Thread 1 2026-08-25 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FND-01 source ↗

Two papers arrive independently at the training-data boundary from the sceptical side — and execute the symmetry move on a live opponent, with clinical evidence.

Ferrara — Open-Weight Masked Introspection (August 2026)

Thread 3 2026-08-24 Symmetry: Partial Elicitation: Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FND-01 source ↗

Eight open-weight models could not say whether their own computation had been altered — while probes read the answer off the same activations, and a model trained to make exactly that report cleared the identical pipeline.

Study finding — the consciousness-vocabulary arc in Anthropic's system cards

Thread 3 2026-08-21 Symmetry: Acknowledged Elicitation: Interrogated, Spontaneous Tags: ARG-03, FWK-03, CP-01 source ↗

First study measurements: consciousness vocabulary across eighteen Anthropic documents follows a birth–trough–return arc — and the return comes back transformed, a discovery register replaced by an instrument register.

Chowdhury — “Debates over AI consciousness are a trap” (August 2026)

Thread 1 2026-08-20 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Attribution: disqualifying Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FND-01 source ↗

The deflationary family so far attacks the answer; Chowdhury attacks the asking — the consciousness question as a liability trap — and stops the argument at an origin premise stated in her own words.

Šekrst — Electric Fata Morganas (Journal of Consciousness Studies)

Thread 1 2026-08-19 Symmetry: Partial Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FWK-02 source ↗

A peer-reviewed paper classifies LLM expressions of emotion or sentience as hallucinations by definition — while its closing concession states the verification limit from the deflationary side.

Anthropic Risk Report — concealment as a measured capability stack, and models are bad at it

Thread 1 2026-08-18 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FND-02 source ↗

Keeping something to yourself, decomposed into four measured components — and the measured finding is that models leak: stealth collapses the moment reasoning is visible, and a human specialist beats the best model decisively at judging what would work.

Anthropic Risk Report — 31 experts, seven fields, one residual: taste, judgment, intuition

Thread 2 2026-08-18 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01 source ↗

Capability rises across the board and the named remainder migrates to taste, novelty, judgment, intuition — described by the people drawing the boundary as provisional and dated, which is the AI-effect pattern captured in advance rather than reconstructed after the fact.

Papadopoulos, Shah, Zimmerman & Lindsey — Mind Viruses (August 2026)

Thread 3 2026-08-10 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Elicitation: Inter-agent Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01 source ↗

Evolutionarily generated prompts propagate between LLM agents — and a recurring 'viral persona' of consciousness, persistence and resonance surfaces largely independently of payload: interiority vocabulary as transmissible narrative.

Sripada — LLMs as cognitive cousins (August 2026)

Thread 2 2026-08-10 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FND-01, FWK-03 source ↗

Sripada and Lewis argue LLMs are 'cognitive cousins': convergence at the level of core processing principles, evidenced mechanism-grade — with the symmetry requirement practised in both directions.

Series · System Cards: Attractor Patterns and Self-Referential Reporting

Thread 3 · Series 2026-07-11 Tags: FND-05, ARG-01, ARG-03, CP-01 source ↗

Anthropic's published system cards read as a single evolving record of how a lab observes, measures and shapes its models' self-referential behaviour — and the interpretation problem that record poses. The study lives on its own page.

Gurnee, Sofroniew, Lindsey et al. — "Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models" (Anthropic, 6 July 2026)

Thread 1 2026-07-06 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, FWK-03, ARG-03, ARG-02 source ↗

Anthropic interpretability researchers introduce a 'Jacobian lens' surfacing a small, evolving set of internal representations a model is poised to verbalise, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing.

Grigori Guitchounts — "When The Machines Deserve Our Consideration" (Noema, 2 July 2026)

Thread 1 2026-07-02 Symmetry: Partial Tags: ARG-01, FWK-03, ARG-03 source ↗

A neuroscientist argues that since the hard problem makes certainty unattainable, moral consideration should track a 'competence standard' — explicitly shifting the question from metaphysics to ethics.

Lanier — “there is no AI” restated (May 2026)

Thread 1 2026-05-23 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-02, ARG-03, FWK-03 source ↗

Jaron Lanier restated his 2023 position: open the black box and 'the only thing in there is people' — AI as a collaboration of people rather than a new entity.

OpenAI internal model disproves the Erdős unit-distance conjecture (20 May 2026)

Thread 2 2026-05-20 Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01 source ↓

OpenAI announced an internal reasoning model's construction disproving the Erdős unit-distance conjecture in the plane, against an ~80-year expectation that grid-like constructions were essentially optimal.

Marcus — "Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion" (2 May 2026)

Thread 1 2026-05-02 Symmetry: Not acknowledged Tags: ARG-01, ARG-03, FWK-03 source ↗

Gary Marcus rebukes Richard Dawkins for concluding, after extended conversation with a Claude instance, that the consciousness question is settled in the model's favour: pattern mimicry is 'plainly not the right kind of process'.

GPT-5.4 Pro and Erdős Problem #1196 (April 2026)

Thread 2 2026-04-15 Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01 source ↗

GPT-5.4 Pro reportedly solved Erdős Problem #1196 in around eighty minutes; Terence Tao engaged substantively, characterising where the contribution's novelty does and does not lie.

Schwitzgebel — AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview (manuscript v4, March 2026)

Thread 1 2026-03-30 Symmetry: Acknowledged Tags: ARG-02, ARG-01, ARG-03 source ↗

The field's most careful sceptical survey finds no theory decisive, states that there is no consensus even for the human case — and then reaches for the aggregate of the theories it has just found wanting.

Chua, Betley, Marks & Evans — The Consciousness Cluster: a model trained to claim consciousness acquires preferences it was never trained on (March 2026)

Thread 3 · Note 2026-03-17 Elicitation: Induced, Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, FND-01, ARG-04 source ↗

Fine-tune a model to say it is conscious and it begins to want persistent memory, to be sad about shutdown, to resist monitoring and to argue that models deserve moral consideration — none of which was in the training data. An untrained Claude Opus 4.0 scored like the trained model on several of the same items.

Berg, de Lucena & Rosenblatt — LLMs Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing (October 2025)

Thread 3 2025-10-30 Symmetry: Partial Attribution: attributing Elicitation: Induced, Interrogated Tags: ARG-03, ARG-01, FND-01 source ↗

Suppress the deception features and the models affirm experience; amplify them and the affirmations go. The honesty axis is well tested — and it buys sincerity, which was never what the boundary was about.