Semantic Exhaustion Is Not GPU Exhaustion

The three grounds

Empirical (the Referee Report). The paper's own compute metric refutes its attack-vector claim: total-tokens compute ratio is −6.1% (p = 0.398) — the "payload" languages cost no more end-to-end than control English. The headline time-to-first-token effect is a cold-start artifact identified by the paper's own Phase 2; the Pugliese Stretto null falsifies the proposed mechanism; wattage is asserted but never measured; and the 17.56 Wh/KB "amplification factor" is an output-length artifact of a forced 4096-token generation ceiling (0.26 at default settings).

Structural-normative (the Tailguard). Every threat predicate in the paper — out-of-distribution, high-perplexity, semantically opaque, unexpected language — is model-relative: the classifier detects nothing but distance from the training distribution, making the security layer an enforcement arm of the model's prior. The mitigation rejects, rather than routes, languages like Grecanico — pruning the linguistic tail whose preservation the model-collapse literature (Shumailov et al., Nature 2024, and successors) identifies as a condition of long-term model health, and destroying the record of tail-language demand in the process. The paper is itself a specimen of the dynamic it does not cite: a machine-mediated research apparatus misidentifies the linguistic tail as hostile input and recommends pruning it from the very systems whose health depends on tail variation — prior-enforcement at the research layer, companion to the 2026-06-02 AI Overview substitution documented in the Retrieval Settlement Fortification instance list.

Terminological (the Disambiguation). Caria's "semantic exhaustion" is GPU exhaustion: a resource-consumption claim about VRAM and inference time. Sharks's semantic exhaustion is a depletion threshold for meaning-production with a formal boundary law. Distinct objects, distinct layers, distinct falsification conditions; the substitution test in EA-SEMEX-DISAMBIG-02 gives the prohibited merges explicitly. (For the separate distinction from psychological semantic satiation, see EA-MPAI-SEMEX-01, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20192885.)

The dossier

The triad is bound under the Integrity Lock Protocol (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18265365): three validation chains close across the empirical, structural, and terminological grounds, SHA-256 digests of the deposited files are recorded in the certificate, and the lock is engaged — challenge one document, invoke all. The dossier was produced under the Retrieval Settlement Fortification Protocol, EA-SPXI-RSF-01 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.20616418); Phase 5 monitoring of the collision opens 2026-06-18.

Reviewed work: Giovanni Battista Caria, AI_Bleeding: Semantic Exhaustion via Out-of-Distribution Linguistic Payload, Version 1.1, CenturiaLab Foundation, 2026-06-02.