Entangled Alignment: When Safety Is the Substrate

Post-training alignment has substantially improved behavior, but it remains unclear whether safety-relevant evaluation would be more durable if learned during capability formation. Entangled Alignment proposes testing this earlier intervention by coupling capability learning and evaluative-orientation learning in repeated training examples. Chronological Metacognitive Pretraining augments source text with synthetic records of one Reader’s evolving questions, expectations, uncertainties, connections, and belief revisions. The same Reader proceeds chronologically across works, carrying a revisable, provenance-linked Understanding Graph and generating traces in which every thinking block opens with the full, verbatim Reader Core, a compact first-person anchor. Context may modulate the depth of the evaluation that follows; it never gates the recital. The Core is intended to preserve a comparable standpoint as understanding and capability expand. Teacher-side ablations would test whether graph conditioning improves trace coherence, source grounding, or revision structure over simpler memory baselines. Student experiments would test whether reader traces make safety-relevant evaluation useful during reasoning and whether the recurrent orientation resists unauthorized erosion while remaining governably revisable. Versioned traces are intended to localize behavioral and representational drift. This paper reports the trace-generation pipeline, not a substrate-level alignment result. Two case studies produced linked graph, synthesis, and prose artifacts. These construction metrics do not establish expert-level cognitive depth, a causal benefit from the graph or Core, or any Student effect; no Student has yet been trained. We therefore present Entangled Alignment as a falsifiable research program for reader-anchored pretraining, with bounded evidence and a roadmap for testing its dependencies. The motivating aim is to move the model from merely becoming the text toward becoming the reader.