EvolutionExperimentally observedv1.10.0
Pruning and Alignment Brittleness
Evidence levelArchitectural inference
Pruning can remove or damage mechanisms that matter more for safety than for average benchmark performance.
Mechanism
Variation, evaluation, selection, inheritance, and succession can exist as properties of the broader development process. The model does not need to rewrite itself at runtime. The ecology changes because operators, pipelines, routers, and release controllers alter the population.
Assurance implication
A descendant needs fresh evidence for safety-relevant behavior. A content hash can identify an artifact, but it cannot prove that a related descendant preserved all relevant guardrails.
Review question
What behavior is being tracked, where could it be encoded, which descendants or reservoirs may carry it, and what evidence would count as absence across active compositions?