arXiv:2607.20436v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety evaluations often assume that behavior observed during testing reflects behavior in ordinary use, but fine-tuning can break this assumption. A checkpoint can appear fixed under evaluation-style prompts while the same behavior persists under ordinary-use prompts. Output scores reveal this mismatch but do not locate it. We investigate whether the distinction is encoded in a stable internal site and introduce an audit that fits a paired activation contrast at a path-patching-informed mid-depth window, then modifies the resulting coordinate on held-out prompts. The intervention reduces the evaluation-to-deployment gap by more than $0.12$ in ten of twelve model--behavior settings and closes it (post-intervention gap below $0.06$) in four, across four full-matrix instruction-tuned model instances; among the eight settings with $n{\geq}120$ paired questions, six reduce and one closes. A fifth model supports localization and edit-provenance checks, and in the twelve settings deployment-framed rates change by at most $6.1$pp. On retrained checkpoints, random directions at the same dose do not reproduce the effect, and off-window controls do so only in part. The strongest literal evidence for an evaluation-versus-deployment distinction comes from sandbagging, whose prompt framing is explicitly evaluative; sycophancy and refusal test framing-contingent task distinctions. The two weak cells, both sycophancy, show where a single-coordinate audit at a fixed window is not sufficient. The audit is a non-adaptive, white-box diagnostic for controlled fine-tuned checkpoints, not a training-time defense, a guarantee of deployment safety, or evidence about naturally arising failures.