Three recent papers all claim "cross-model" KV transfer. Each smuggles in a crutch that narrows what the word means. Here is the bar that would make the strict claim falsifiable. Cross-model KV transfer has a precise, seductive claim: one language model does the expensive prefill, another model decodes from the resulting state, and the second model never re-reads the prompt. If it worked, context would stop being a disposable token sequence and become a transportable artifact

The token is not a choice. It's a hardware constraint — and it's the wrong level of abstraction for thinking about what a model understands. Imagine opening a book and having to read it from the beginning every time. Not because you forgot — because someone rips out your bookmarks between each reading. That is what a language model does. On every call, it rebuilds its understanding of the context from scratch. The state it produced — what it had "understood" — is thrown away