A published theoretical account of phase structure in rotary attention was subjected to two pre-specified empirical tests of whether phase-derived features improve prediction of a commitment or contradiction endpoint over a baseline that does not receive those features. Study 1 froze a contradiction-category pipeline and scored a sealed primary comparison of PC-2 against baseline. On 1,136 eligible cases the paired AUROC difference was +0.00087. The 99% interval included zero, and the difference did not reach the pre-specified threshold of +0.05. Advancement was not passed. Study 2 developed fifteen layer treatments on open blocks b0-b4 only (1,415 transitions, 20x5 grouped folds). A locked conjunctive rule required a positive PC-2 mean-repeat increment, a positive increment on at least four of five seed blocks, and a positive mean of those five differences. No treatment advanced. The official selection is null. The theoretical paper is not withdrawn. The extra ranking lift was not found under the rules locked in advance.
Behavioural auditing asks whether a language model behaves as it claims, but detection scores are reported without separating two targets: whether a reply was produced under a behaviour-inducing condition (exposure) and whether the behaviour surfaced in it (manifestation). Scoring a compact 146-million-parameter auditor's frozen-representation read-out and a frontier judge against each label on the identical 720 replies, the gap between the instruments moves by roughly 0.2 AUROC when the target changes. Under the judge's deployed interface, a single verdict, the ranking reverses: the auditor leads on exposure, 0.804 against 0.718, and trails on manifestation, 0.690 against 0.811. Matching the output resolution from either direction, by asking the judge a target-specific question answered with a continuous confidence score or by thresholding the auditor's read-out, removes the reversal but not the interaction, which excludes zero at all three resolutions (0.207, 0.237 and 0.169). The target governs how far apart the instruments are; the interface governs whether that distance changes their order. The auditor's hyperbolic geometry confers no advantage here. A single behavioural-detection AUROC is under-specified: such claims are comparable only when they state the estimand, the evaluator, and its output interface.