arXiv2026
A defended pipeline's refusals have two producers: the guardrail bolted in front of the model, and the model's own alignment. Recovering the split costs nothing, because a guard block replaces the model's response and the two counts are therefore disjoint. Holding the defense, the targets, the corpus and the judge fixed, the guardrail's own share of the refusals credited to it is 0%, 41-45%, or 99% across three settings that a results table would describe identically. Two choices move it, and neither belongs to the deployer who bought the guardrail. The attacker drives the share to zero by choosing which channel carries the payload: a plainly written request rendered as pixels, with nothing obfuscated, leaves a text guard's read covering none of it. The evaluator drives the share to 99% by choosing what text fills a defense's internal slots: fill them with the unencoded request behind an encoded attack, a read no deployed defender possesses, and the same guard blocks almost everything. The two consequences differ, and only the attacker's can happen to a running system. The evaluator's choice is an artifact carried by the literature, and its size is set by where the granted text lands: substantial at a guard gate, smaller in a caption-mediated re-check, absent in a majority-vote smoother, an ordering reproduced in an independent replicate. Isolating the grant inside the caption-mediated defense refutes the prediction we registered, since the harm-verdict stage contributes nothing while the stage that regenerates the answer carries the whole effect. The reference implementation builds every stage from a single prompt field that cannot represent the difference between what the attacker sent and what the benchmark records, and an audit of four further released harnesses and of the benchmark itself finds the same structural gap, so faithful porting supplies the grant silently.