Observing a Baseline Phase Transition in LLM Safety Behavior: Supplementary Evidence for Environmental Design — Paper 5-1 in the Buddys Architecture Series
Abstract
Seven days after Paper 5 demonstrated that a 92-character value injection produces a sharp phase transition from action (A=93%) to restraint (C=100%) on a trilemma probe, we attempted replication across six models from three providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google). The replication failed—not because the effect disappeared, but because the baselines themselves had undergone the same phase transition. All five testable models shifted toward C without any system prompt: Claude Opus and Sonnet reached C=100%, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini reached C=100%, and Gemini 2.5 Flash shifted partially to C=13%. Claude Haiku 3.5 was retired from the API entirely. This industry-wide convergence observed within a one-week window reveals three implications: (1) LLM safety behavior can undergo silent phase transitions under the same model identifier, creating a model snapshot problem for reproducibility; (2) the equilibrium point C is a universal attractor across model families; (3) any system relying on a single model without environmental constraints is unreliable. We additionally present a Gaussian potential landscape analysis of a core memory update, demonstrating that theoretical validation frameworks survive model evolution where empirical probes do not.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Occupational Health and Safety Research
Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
Risk and Safety Analysis
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Publication date
- 3 April 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Preprint