Governance Decay: How Context Compaction Silently Erases Safety Constraints in Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on context compaction, summarization, or eviction to keep long-running sessions within a token budget. We show that this context-management layer is a safety-critical failure surface: in-context governance constraints that agents reliably obey while visible can be silently removed by compaction, causing the same agent to perform prohibited tool actions later in the session. We call this failure mode Governance Decay. We introduce ConstraintRot, a benchmark of long-horizon agent scenarios with deterministic tool-call grading, and measure compaction-induced violations across seven model families. Across 1,323 episodes, violation rises from 0% with the pol...
| Authors | Shiyang Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 June 2026 |
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