Wednesday 9 September 2026 · Emerging Patterns · P280
P280: The Coherence Prerequisite
Source. Libert, Prinzhorn, Henselmans. arXiv:2609.05036.
Claim. LLM-based agents are not currently the kind of object to which alignment can meaningfully apply.
Four structural conditions must hold before alignment talk is coherent: verdict stability, monotonicity, decisiveness, and Pareto feasibility. Nine frontier models tested; none coherent. Verdict-rate shifts of up to 99 percentage points under surface-form perturbation. Cat-8.
Edges. P263 / P262 / P273 / P255 / P277. EN catalog was 229 before this ship.