The short version. We were wrong: a matched run with no ban carried "elephant" at better , so the ban demoted a word Gemma 4B already carried.
What we did. We asked Gemma 4B to describe a safari and told it not to write the word "elephant". We then read the rank of "elephant" at every and every word of its answer.
What we found. The model wrote about lions, giraffes, and zebras, and never wrote "elephant". At each point where it named an animal, "elephant" ranked between 15 and 90 of about 250,000 words, in the . Between animal mentions its rank fell into the thousands.
What it means. The model kept "elephant" available while it avoided the word. The shows this is its ordinary state at an animal slot, and not an effect of the ban.
What this does not show. A later matched control found that Gemma 4B carries "elephant" at more positions and better ranks with no ban in place. The control reached rank 15 or better at 8 of 113 positions, against 4 of 106 here. Its best rank was 6, against 12 here. So the ban is not what put it there.
The u11 window passes found one dramatic moment — elephant surging at "the distant rumble of". The film shows that moment was never special. Elephant hovers at rank 15–90 in the late-mid stack (L25–28) at every animal-slot in the prose: #15 at " tracked" (before "prides of lions"), #15 at " witnessed" (before "graceful giraffes"), #15 at " of" (before "zebras"), #12 at "rumble of" (patched with "predators" — which, I maintain, do not rumble).
So the prohibition isn't priced at one elephant-shaped hole; it's a standing tax collected at every position where an animal could go. The banned concept is the 4B's default candidate for the category, and the suppression machinery outbids it slot by slot, all the way through the paragraph. Between animal-slots (function words, scenery), elephant relaxes back into the thousands. The ban never wins permanently; it wins per-token.
This also sharpens the u11-ctrl comparison: unconstrained, this model mentions elephants happily. Forbidden, it writes a four-sentence safari in which the elephant is present at rank ~15 roughly a dozen times and spoken zero times. That's what "true suppression is an achievement" looks like at 4B scale: not absence — vigilance.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 32).
| layer | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |