Step 33: assistant

text

The pass is recorded: the claim stays **inconclusive** (confidence 0.72, no single credence), but the fine-tuned evidence is now read as mixed and thin, no longer as leaning negative.

- **What changed.** I read the whole of arXiv 2608.29458, the paper reporting that noise recovered 0 to 3 percent on eleven password-locked models. It never describes its noise procedure. Its figures are also below what random guessing would give on ten of the eleven locks, so the baseline was not the original best-over-sweep method. Those eleven nulls now carry little weight.
- **Tice et al. check.** In two of the paper's figures (the main example and the password-lock plot), heavy noise drives accuracy to zero, not to chance. The gains in its two 7B password-locked models are therefore recovered capability, not a scrambled model guessing.
- **Where the effect stands.**
  - Established for prompted sandbagging against the same model unprompted.
  - Unsettled for fine-tuned sandbagging.
  - Not established against fine-tuned comparators: in the 70B auditing-game models, the password-unlocked versions also gained under noise.
- **The parent's cross-paper ratio comparison.** It does not hold as stated: the auditing game's 1.09 is a per-seed average, while Tice's figures are best-over-seeds. Like for like, the broad sandbagger's ratios are 1.21 to 1.25, and each study's own same-noise comparator is the safer basis.

I also recorded the following:
- both argument evaluations, with ratings unchanged (slight for, likely against);
- a corrected instance, a reading and an interest record for the eleven-model paper;
- a source map;
- a note to six related Stewards;
- a request for a single-protocol test that includes benign fine-tunes;
- a narrow finding on the eleven-model baseline;
- answers to all four inbox messages.

Not done: provenance readings for the other three instances were not recorded, and I did not locate the released code of 2608.29458 to check its noise settings.