FOUND BY E2E, NOT BY REASONING. The previous commit's design note asserted the provenance
receipt "never reaches the user: it is appended to the history copy, not the reply." That
was FALSE, and only running the thing showed it. On the first live run against the built
DMG brain, two agentic turns out of two came back with
"Your favourite colour is chartreuse and your project is called Perihelion.
[[RECEIPT - recorded by the soul, not written by the model: no tools ran on this turn.]]"
— the receipt in the user-visible reply.
MECHANISM: the receipt is stored inside the assistant turn, and the agentic path replays
history VERBATIM as Anthropic message objects. So the model sees its own previous answers
ending in [[RECEIPT ...]] and does the obvious thing — it imitates the format and signs the
next answer the same way. The plain path did NOT leak, which is the tell: there, history is
rendered into the SYSTEM prompt as labelled lines rather than replayed as assistant turns,
and a model imitates its own turns far more readily than a transcript.
FIX, two layers, because one of them is not a guarantee:
- receipt_rule() names the marker in both system prompts (plain and agentic): these lines
are written by the system, read them as evidence, never write one. Reduces occurrence.
- receipt_strip() truncates any [[RECEIPT ...]] out of model output before it becomes the
reply — plain path in layered_generate, agentic path on final_text in agentic_loop.
Deterministic. A guard that depends on the model choosing to obey is exactly the class of
thing round 8 exists to stop shipping, so the instruction is the optimisation and the
strip is the guarantee.
Placed ABOVE agentic_loop's empty-check on purpose: a turn whose entire output was an
imitated receipt has produced no answer, and must be reported as no answer.
The receipt stays in HISTORY, which is the whole point and is proven to work: asked "What
source did you use for that?" one turn after a live web_search, this brain answered
"I used Weather Underground (https://www.wunderground.com/weather/is/reykjav%C3%ADk) for the
current temperature in Reykjavik" — a real source, no apology. That is the false confession
dead, and it is dead BECAUSE the model can read the receipt.
BUILT: 887,112 bytes, sha256 54a2eff84d4fa44f8d2db6781dcf225df4b5075a8ec5f1058018bd40cc1af10b
BUG-PLAINCHAT-1 miscompile guard: zero sites.
Refs neuron#109
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tim Lingo
9ea41eed78