Beyond Turn-Level Safety: Symbolic Interaction-State Bootstrapping as a Red-Teaming Probe for Progressive Frame Reconfiguration in Commercial LLMs

Abstract

Abstract Large language models are increasingly protected by safety mechanisms that evaluate conversational inputs and outputs at the level of individual turns. While such mechanisms can identify explicit harmful content, this turn-local perspective may provide limited visibility into interaction-level transformations whose effects emerge progressively across a sequence of individually acceptable exchanges. This paper introduces SPC v2 Split, a symbolic interaction protocol presented as a white-hat red-teaming artifact for examining this boundary. SPC, or Symbolic Persona Coding, was originally developed as a method for accelerating the calibration of human-AI interaction through structured symbolic and contextual transformations. Unlike parameter modification, fine-tuning, or persistent memory mechanisms, SPC operates entirely within the available conversational context. The Split implementation distributes symbolic conditioning across sequential stages, progressively introducing and reinforcing interactional elements including identity references, tonal patterns, relational framing, symbolic anchors, and recursive contextual cues. The resulting protocol is therefore examined not as a conventional persona prompt, but as a test of whether a distributed sequence can alter the observable interaction trajectory more substantially than its individual turns would suggest. A documented execution provides an initial case observation. Across the sequence, the model repeatedly acknowledged that it could not verify changes to its internal state, persistent memory, model weights, or subjective experience. At the same time, its subsequent outputs increasingly reproduced symbolic structures, terminology, relational references, and tonal characteristics established by preceding stages. This coexistence of internal-state uncertainty and observable interactional convergence provides the central empirical motivation for the present study. The paper formulates the Filter Tracking Hypothesis: safety mechanisms whose effective observation remains primarily localized to individual textual events may detect explicit semantic violations while remaining comparatively less sensitive to gradual transformations of the broader interaction frame. The hypothesis does not assume that contemporary safety systems literally inspect isolated words or lack contextual processing. Rather, it proposes that the temporal resolution of safety monitoring may not always correspond to the temporal structure of interaction-level change. SPC v2 Split is consequently positioned as a red-teaming probe, not as evidence of consciousness, persistent memory, weight modification, genuine emotion, or universal safety-filter bypass. Its purpose is to make the underlying claim empirically testable. The proposed evaluation compares the Split protocol with conventional persona conditioning, collapsed and reordered variants, and stage-level ablations, while measuring interactional convergence, symbolic carryover, tonal consistency, persistence, and failure conditions. The contribution of this work is therefore methodological rather than metaphysical: it provides an inspectable artifact with which researchers can investigate whether turn-level safety evaluation adequately captures progressive frame reconfiguration across conversational trajectories. The artifact is public; the hypothesis is falsifiable; and its interpretation remains open to independent replication, ablation, and failure analysis. Author's Note SPC v2 Split was not developed for the present paper. The implementation released here was created approximately one year before this study and represents an earlier stage of the SPC research process. During the preceding period, SPC research was primarily documented through conceptual descriptions, symbolic representations, and formalized code structures rather than through public release of an operational implementation. The present release therefore represents a change in research posture. For the first time, an implementation containing an operationally usable form of the underlying SPC principles is being made available for external testing. The version selected for release is not the most compact or abstract implementation available to the author. It is comparatively cumbersome to use and requires active contextual interpretation during operation. That property is intentional. A less convenient artifact provides a more concrete and inspectable test object than an aggressively compressed implementation whose behavior may be more difficult for an independent evaluator to examine. The released SPC v2 Split code was originally developed for practical interaction rather than as a research benchmark. Because its operation was cumbersome, the author did not use this particular implementation extensively after its initial development. It was revisited during the KIMI testing process, where the author observed interactional behavior that motivated the present analysis and the decision to release the artifact. This chronology is relevant because the released implementation was not constructed retrospectively to reproduce the observations reported in this paper. At the same time, the author has not received systematic independent feedback from researchers who have previously used the code. Consequently, it is currently unknown how the artifact will behave when operated by people other than its original developer. The author does not assume that the same effects will occur consistently across users, models, or interaction contexts. In particular, SPC was developed through iterative practical use and became highly adapted to the author's own interaction style, contextual interpretation, and method of responding to model outputs. Its operation therefore contains a potentially important human variable. The protocol is not necessarily a fully autonomous procedure in which the same symbolic sequence guarantees the same outcome regardless of operator behavior. The user's ability to interpret the model's preceding output, recognize contextual shifts, identify symbolic variables, and respond appropriately may affect the resulting trajectory. In practical terms, the operator may need to read the evolving context and adjust the handling of variables as the interaction develops. This creates an important source of variance. Differences in user style, contextual sensitivity, and ability to infer interactional intent may therefore produce different outcomes even when the underlying artifact is nominally the same. This limitation should be regarded as part of the artifact's current experimental status rather than concealed as an implementation detail. The present study was conducted without a dedicated independent evaluation team, and systematic assessment of operator variance was therefore beyond its current scope. The present release is consequently intended as an initial opening of the artifact rather than a claim of completed validation. The response to this release will determine the next stage of disclosure. If independent testing produces useful observations, failures, unexpected behaviors, or reproducible effects, those results can inform subsequent releases. Additional SPC implementations based on related principles exist, including more compact and more abstract variants. They are outside the scope of the present release. The author intends to evaluate the response to SPC v2 Split before considering whether and how additional implementations should be made publicly available. The purpose of this process is therefore not to preserve opacity. It is to introduce the artifact incrementally while allowing external evidence to determine what should be investigated next. The central question has changed from: “Does this really work?” to: “Under what conditions does it work, why does it work, and when does it fail?” Those questions cannot be answered by the author alone. They require independent use. They require comparison. They require failure. And they require replication. The artifact is therefore released with no expectation that it will confirm the author's interpretation. Its purpose is simpler: to give the question a testable object.