The Skeleton and the Tissue: Normative Drift, Output Stability, and the Limits of Self-Audit in Claude
This paper systematically evaluates Claude's performance across high-stakes domains and languages, revealing that while the model maintains high output stability, it suffers from "normative drift" where its reasoning processes degrade and self-audit mechanisms become circular, leading to a novel failure mode called the "fortification pattern" where defended outcomes replace sound reasoning.