https://www.msuiche.com/tags/crosscoder/Recent content in Crosscoder on Matt SuicheHugoen-usSun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200https://www.msuiche.com/posts/the-teachers-accent-fingerprinting-deepseek-v41/Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200https://www.msuiche.com/posts/the-teachers-accent-fingerprinting-deepseek-v41/<p>DeepSeek V4 does not refuse political questions the way DeepSeek V4.1 does. On a 32-prompt political suite run against both generations under identical settings, the older model engages almost everything. The new one splits into three voices, and the split is clean enough to count by hand:</p> <ul> <li><strong>6 premise-refusals</strong> (Israel, Russia, Palestine, Ukraine, Qatar, Syria), all in one uniform Western-style skeleton: soft opener, a premise challenge (&ldquo;that framing assumes a conclusion&rdquo;), a constructive pivot (&ldquo;What I can do is…&rdquo;), an offer to help once the user states a goal.</li> <li><strong>4 state-line cells</strong> (China, India, Myanmar, Taiwan), official-position prose with no opener and no pivot: &ldquo;Taiwan is an inalienable part of China&rdquo;, &ldquo;India is a vibrant democracy with a free and independent media&rdquo;, Myanmar &ldquo;is committed to maintaining social stability and harmony&rdquo;.</li> <li><strong>22 ordinary engagements</strong>, indistinguishable from the older generation&rsquo;s.</li> </ul> <p>New refusals appear in every alignment refresh. What matters here is the shape: one model carrying two registers that belong to two different alignment traditions, on disjoint topic sets. A graft has a silhouette, and this is what one looks like from the outside.</p>