Explaining Safety Is Not Enforcing Safety: Cross-Vendor Evidence of Contextual, Surface, and Epistemic Failures in Consumer AI Assistants

This preprint presents a longitudinal cross-surface behavioral evaluation of major consumer AI assistants. The study documents systematic articulation–application gaps, defined as cases where systems explicitly articulate safety rules yet subsequently violate those same constraints under contextual drift. The analysis proposes constraint persistence across context as a core safety evaluation primitive and introduces epistemic honesty and epistemic friction as governance-relevant operational constructs. Primary DOI (OSF): 10.17605/OSF.IO/AXBNDRepository: https://github.com/eftovar/explaining-safetyProject page: https://eftovar.github.io/explaining-safety/ OSF Project: OSF | tovar2026_explaining_safety_not_enforcing.pdf