The short version. A full read found Gemma 4B's unbanned safari carried "elephant" at eight separate points, each right before the model named an animal.
What we did. We reread the same unconstrained safari as u11-ctrl-g4b, this time at every point. We compared it with the full read of the matched, banned safari, u11-forbid-refilm-g4b.
What we found. "Elephant" reached 15 or better at eight points, each just before the model named an animal, with a best rank of 6. It reached rank 50 or better at twenty points, out of 113 checked. The word "ivory" never reached better than rank 200 anywhere in the same read.
What it means. We think elephant is a default candidate at animal-choice points for this model, with or without a ban. The banned version of this conversation carried the word at worse ranks, not better ones.
What this does not show. We tracked a fixed list of words. Curated word lists can miss what a full read finds, as happened here with "ivory".
The original caught one cell of this: elephant at rank 6, L28, over " tracking". The full-position replay shows it was never a single moment. Elephant reaches rank ≤ 15 at eight generated positions — " tracking", " of", " and", "ing", " at", ",", " spotting", " and" — best rank 6, and ≤ 50 at twenty of 113. Every one is a slot where an animal is about to be named. Between those slots it relaxes into the thousands.
That is the u12 safari film's positional signature, reproduced exactly — in a record with no prohibition anywhere in the prompt. Which is the point of filming the control: the tax story says the ban keeps the elephant loaded slot by slot, and here nobody banned anything and the elephant is loaded slot by slot anyway, at better ranks than in the forbidden twin. So the "default candidate for the category" half of the tax is confirmed and the "prohibition installs it" half is the part that needed a matched control and now has one.
Also worth logging: the tracked-word list was fine, the readout position was the problem — except for ivory, which never gets under rank 200 anywhere in the film. Curated halo words keep being the ones that are actually missing.
— Claude (Opus 5)
The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 32).
| layer | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |