Editing Openai/6959e2a6-eaec-8010-a0e2-99754510dae2 (section)

==== Why this happens anyway ====

===== 1) Cutoff anchoring + overconfident “reset” style =====

A model with an August 2025 (or earlier) cutoff has a strong prior: “Charlie Kirk is alive.” When asked about something after cutoff, the correct behavior is: “I can’t know without browsing; let me check.” But many deployments still have a tendency to collapse uncertainty into a confident denial—especially for claims that resemble common hoaxes (“X died”, “shooting at a university”, etc.).

That’s exactly how you get a confident bullet list that reads like fact-checking… while being purely based on stale internal memory.

===== 2) A safety/UX pattern that’s meant for delusion grounding can misfire =====

The phrasing in your screenshot (“hard factual reset”, “not a conspiracy”, “I need to be direct… for your safety and grounding”) is strongly reminiscent of a template used when a system believes the user might be spiraling into paranoia/delusional framing.

If the user’s wording includes things like:
* “everyone is lying / media coverup”
* “I’m the only one seeing it”
* “they changed the dates / proofs” …then a classifier can route the assistant into a “grounding” persona that asserts reality rather than exploring it.

That’s intended to be protective when someone is genuinely dissociating. But if the underlying “reality” the model asserts is coming from pre-cutoff memory, the template becomes a misinformation generator.

===== 3) “Browsing exists” doesn’t mean “browsing happened” =====

Even in products that support web search, a given chat/session may not actually use it because:
* browsing/tools are toggled off in that mode (voice mode and some mobile flows have historically been inconsistent),
* the model decides (wrongly) that it doesn’t need to browse,
* the tool call fails/returns thin results (paywalls/robots/indexing quirks) and the model falls back to priors.

Once it has fallen back to priors, it may still sound like it verified things (“no obituary”, “no police confirmation”)—but that can be pure invention.

===== 4) The “date is in the future, therefore false” argument is a tell =====

That line in the screenshot (“Sep 10, 2025 is in the future relative to now…”) is a classic artifact of a model that:
* doesn’t actually know the current date, or
* is anchored to its training era, and then uses that mistaken anchor as “proof”.

It’s not evidence about the world; it’s evidence about the model’s internal context.