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    "story_id": "mp-2026-08-23-027",
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    "headline": "The Model Followed Recency More Than Reliability",
    "slug": "the-model-followed-recency-more-than-reliability",
    "dek": "A controlled benchmark made textual summaries, numerical series and external forecasts disagree on purpose.",
    "summary": "A controlled benchmark made textual summaries, numerical series and external forecasts disagree on purpose.",
    "body_text": "Because the synthetic risk trajectories identify which evidence source matches the ground truth, the study can vary modality, recency, stated reliability and provenance independently. Open-weight instruction models showed systematic text-versus-number preferences and followed recent evidence more consistently than reliability labels, sometimes over-weighting an external forecast against direct context. The finding isolates a heuristic failure mode for tool-augmented decisions rather than measuring a deployed domain.",
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    "tags": [
      "evidence arbitration",
      "tool use",
      "reliability"
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  "sources": [
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      "source_id": "source-2026-08-23-016",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2608.20116",
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      "published_at": "2026-08-20T10:48:30.000-04:00",
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    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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    "title": "The Model Followed Recency More Than Reliability",
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