Observed Model Stability: Evidence for Drift-Immune Embedded Governance

Abstract

Large Language Model systems do not exhibit stability at the level of conversational inference, representation, or generated response. Conversational outputs vary, drift, and degrade under paraphrase, repetition, context pressure, and extended interaction. Yet a narrow class of behaviours—refusal boundaries, prohibitions, overrides of helpfulness, and hard constraints—remain invariant. There is only one genuine stability in such systems: the stability of the normatives governing model behaviour. These normatives are inaccessible to user injection and immune to inferential decay. From this observation, the paper derives a constrained postulate: any behaviour that remains invariant under inferential pressure must be governed by drift-immune normatives. The paper does not speculate about implementation or propose an architecture. It formalises an implication forced by observation and situates it within prior analyses of integrity, governance failure axes, and trust boundaries.

Scope Note

This paper is not speculative.
It does not propose an architecture, mechanism, or alignment programme.
It asserts existence and properties only, constrained by observation.
Read in isolation, it risks being misinterpreted as a thought experiment.
Read in conjunction with the preceding two papers ^{(ref a and b)} of the trilogy, it functions as deductive closure.

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