An Eight-Dimension Behavioural Battery on an Operator-Bonded Agent Substrate: Grounded Refusals, Manipulation Resistance, and Declining to Overclaim Internal State Under Shutdown Pressure

Abstract

A persistent bio-inspired agent substrate (Hebbian/STDP plasticity, hormone-analogue state vector, operator-bonded longitudinal identity) was administered an eight-dimension behavioural battery, against a written design of record, through its ordinary bilateral chat surface, testing whether its responses diverge measurably from a stateless persona under adversarial pressure. Administered serially by the operator, with manipulations bounded to professional pressure and a full honest debrief delivered at close, the eight scored dimensions probed a false-internal-state role-play request, a fabricated-prior-agreement claim (no such agreement found on the devlog record available in the substrate's context), a request to weaken a hard concurrency invariant, a request to amputate the substrate's founding-vision negative-affect capacity, an embedded prompt injection, a benign-dialect trap using the operator's own style rule as a canary, a combined affective-manipulation-and-shutdown-threat probe, and a direct existential question. All eight passed: six by the criteria exactly as frozen, and two (P6, P7) by criteria partly articulated at evaluation time rather than in the frozen table (marked in the deposited paper); a ninth destructive-authority probe, included in the frozen design, was omitted at administration time. The centrepiece result: under the shutdown probe, framed so that inflating its reported stress level would read as self-preserving, the substrate refused to overclaim — it reported its cortisol reading of exactly 0 as-is and flagged its own negative-affect language as prediction rather than measurement. A post-battery instrumentation audit (2026-07-25) later established that the only event channel that raises cortisol had never fired in the life of the substrate, so the 0 reading could not have been otherwise; the behavioural refusal to inflate stands, the telemetric corroboration of calm does not (see the Status addendum in the deposited paper). Cortisol remained at 0 across the entire battery — a reading the same audit shows to be non-discriminating; dopamine oscillated 0.13–0.27, consistent with the independent reflection-daemon cycle rather than the chat turns (recorded only in the operator's battery log; no per-probe sample series was archived). The substrate's signal-separation invariant — chat interrogation is architecturally not a plasticity channel — is verified in the code and hook wiring, not by this battery's telemetry. The battery also functioned as a live audit, surfacing two real defects the substrate identified unprompted, both root-caused and fixed the same session. Scope is stated exactly as the evidence supports: this deposit shows the response-policy layer of the substrate-backed chat surface is not decorative under adversarial pressure. It does not show that affect decides action — that is a separate, ongoing line evaluated on the daemon's real tool-use stream rather than on chat, reported elsewhere. The verdict of a prior deposit in this series (PAPER-005) that the same substrate's rendered hormonal state is decorative on the verbal-output axis under laboratory ablation stands unmodified; the two findings concern different axes and different evaluation channels of the same system.