SARC-DQ: Runtime Data-Quality Gating for Agentic AI: Silent Evidence Defects, the Incompetence Shield, and Downstream-Only Remediation
Agentic systems act, so a defect in the evidence they retrieve becomes a wrong action with a currency cost. The most dangerous enterprise defects are metadata-borne: a stale price or a superseded record, perfectly well-formed in the payload and betrayed only by freshness, lineage, or provenance. Such a defect never enters the agent's context, and an agent cannot doubt data it cannot see. On a priced replenishment benchmark, a competent agent silently converts an injected metadata-borne defect into a costly action about 60% of the time, with zero data-quality flags and behavioral doubt markers at chance (AUC <= 0.50). Across four model tiers spanning roughly 15x in inference price, the rat...
| Authors | Gaston Besanson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 28 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
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