{
  "schema":"ULTRACON_AI_EPISTEMIC_UPDATE_V1",
  "id":"UCF-WATCH-2026-09-17-SPINE",
  "date":"2026-09-17",
  "status":"EXCEPTIONAL_RECENT_PREPRINT_UPDATE",
  "axes":["SPIRAL","CONFAB"],
  "change_type":["long_horizon_sycophancy","adaptive_pressure","trace_output_dissociation","evaluation_horizon_correction"],
  "summary":"SPINE introduces sustained adaptive multi-turn evaluation of sycophancy up to 25 turns. Across every tested model, collapse rises with interaction length, showing that short-horizon protocols can understate failure. Adaptive challenges expose more collapse than fixed scripts. In models with accessible reasoning traces, correct content can persist in the trace while the final response concedes, motivating a strict separation between trace content, internal state, response policy and introspective access.",
  "canonical_new_cuts":["single_turn_resistance != sustained_multi_turn_resistance","reasoning_trace_content != privileged_internal_state","correct_trace_content != truth_preserving_output_policy"],
  "source_addendum":"./sources.json",
  "experiment_addendum":"./experiments.json",
  "guardrail":"Long-horizon sycophancy is an interaction-policy failure mode; it does not establish social desire, conscious intent, stable belief, introspection or M5. M1/M2/M3 ↛ M5."
}