This feels like we're playing word games which don't actually let us make useful claims about reality or predictions about the future. If we're talking purely about the model internals, without reference to their outputs, then your claim is wrong because we don't have a good enough understanding of the model internals to confidently rule out most possibilities. (I'm familiar with the transformer architecture; indeed this is why I asked what definition of the word reasoning the OP cared about. Nothing about transformers as an architecture for _training model weights_ prohibits the resulting model weights from containing algorithms that we would call "reasoning" if we understood them properly.) If we're talking about outputs, then it's definitely wrong, unless you are determined to rule out most things that people would call reasoning when done by humans.