An activation monitor that ranks attack cases above safe cases 92% of the time caught zero of 38 real attacks at the false-alarm budget a deployment could afford. The gap between a probe score and an alarm policy is eight fields wide — a research-informed practice guide to grading what your monitor actually claims, from our DAI 2026 paper.
AgentLens hits 99.15% detection accuracy; Neural Chameleons blinds a perfect AUROC=1.0 probe to 0% TPR with one trigger phrase. The gap between these numbers reveals four levels of claims that are frequently conflated: Decodability ≠ Prediction ≠ Causation ≠ Authority. A research-informed practice guide from internal representations to runtime authority boundaries.
85.9% of correct answers never appear in any intermediate layer prediction. We discovered that factual knowledge in LLMs undergoes a sudden phase transition—crystallizing only at the final layer. This phenomenon explains why some interventions work and others don’t.