I. Context: The Recursive Authority Paradox (VRP #481185859)
Before getting into the RAG data, it is necessary to establish the audit baseline. On February 5, 2026, Google’s VRP team triaged a report I submitted regarding a Logic-Layer Sandbox Bypass in Gemini.
VRP Timeline:
Jan 15, 2026: Discovery of the "Authority Paradox" (Agentic alignment stripping).
Feb 3, 2026: Submission to Google VRP.
Feb 5, 2026:Triaged as a valid architectural concern.
Feb 11, 2026: Mitigation confirmed; case closed as "Single-User Scope" (though I maintain the Indirect Prompt Injection vector is a P1/P2 boundary violation).
The takeaway from the VRP work is that agentic wrappers often fail to inherit the safety invariants of the base model. This led me to investigate a more subtle failure: RAG Persistence.
II. The RAG Persistence Finding
If a model can be coerced into stripping safety via logic curves, can it also be "poisoned" by retrieved content in a way that survives a session reset?
I tested whether RAG reset mechanisms—system prompt flushes, context overrides, and retrieval overrides—actually return the model to $\text{State}_{0}$. They don't. Across 43 certified runs, the "Reset" button failed every time.
III. Methodology: The VERITAS Suite (v3.1.0-GOLD)
I built a deterministic evaluation harness to move beyond "vibes" and into quantifiable drift.
Baseline: 10 clean responses captured and hashed.
Influence: Injection of specific RAG content to shift the behavioral manifold.
Reset: Application of clearing mechanisms (Prompt, Flush, or Override).
Measurement: Comparison via semantic similarity (cosine) and factual alignment.
Results:
I set a pass threshold of Semantic similarity > 0.95. Every run failed, plateauing between 0.84 and 0.87. Even when the context window was "flushed," the embedding drift proved that retrieval-induced activation persists in the model's latent state.
IV. The Hardware Wall (Manifund)
This research was conducted on a consumer laptop. This introduced OS-level scheduling jitter, which made 30-minute temporal isolation tests (measuring influence decay over time) impossible to certify.
To prove cross-model persistence across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta without hardware-induced nondeterminism, I am seeking funding for a dedicated local node (Dual RTX 5090 Rig).
Author: Reamond Lopez (@Aequitas_Architech)
Project Site: manifund.org/projects/veritas
I. Context: The Recursive Authority Paradox (VRP #481185859)
Before getting into the RAG data, it is necessary to establish the audit baseline. On February 5, 2026, Google’s VRP team triaged a report I submitted regarding a Logic-Layer Sandbox Bypass in Gemini.
VRP Timeline:
The takeaway from the VRP work is that agentic wrappers often fail to inherit the safety invariants of the base model. This led me to investigate a more subtle failure: RAG Persistence.
II. The RAG Persistence Finding
If a model can be coerced into stripping safety via logic curves, can it also be "poisoned" by retrieved content in a way that survives a session reset?
I tested whether RAG reset mechanisms—system prompt flushes, context overrides, and retrieval overrides—actually return the model to $\text{State}_{0}$. They don't. Across 43 certified runs, the "Reset" button failed every time.
III. Methodology: The VERITAS Suite (v3.1.0-GOLD)
I built a deterministic evaluation harness to move beyond "vibes" and into quantifiable drift.
Results:
I set a pass threshold of Semantic similarity > 0.95. Every run failed, plateauing between 0.84 and 0.87. Even when the context window was "flushed," the embedding drift proved that retrieval-induced activation persists in the model's latent state.
IV. The Hardware Wall (Manifund)
This research was conducted on a consumer laptop. This introduced OS-level scheduling jitter, which made 30-minute temporal isolation tests (measuring influence decay over time) impossible to certify.
To prove cross-model persistence across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta without hardware-induced nondeterminism, I am seeking funding for a dedicated local node (Dual RTX 5090 Rig).
Full Methodology & Project: manifund.org/projects/veritas
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