Lying Is Just a Phase: The Hidden Alignment Transition in Language Model Scaling

ArXi:2605.18838v1 Announce Type: cross Scaling laws predict loss from compute but not how capabilities interact. We measure the coupling between reasoning and truthfulness across 63 base models from 16 families and find a regime change invisible to loss curves: below a family-dependent critical scale $N_c$, capabilities anticorrelate; above it, they cooperate. $N_c \approx 3.5$B parameters [2.9B, 13.4B] (bootstrap 95% CI), but model size is not the only variable that determines phase. Architecture, data curation, and.