Best Friends, Not Forever: Evaluating Long-Horizon Persona Collapse and Behavioral Drift in AI Companions
As AI companions increasingly mediate repeated social interaction, users may rely on a stable role and shared history, yet locally acceptable replies do not ensure that either persists. We study two observable long-horizon failures: 'persona collapse', the loss of a deployed role, boundaries, values, or style, and 'behavioral drift', the gradual or recurrent erosion of those properties. We introduce ANCHOR, a controlled synthetic audit that separately measures persona enactment and trajectory recall. The study contains 2,008 conversations spanning 27 personas, nine interaction schedules, three generated memory settings, and four evaluated models. The Identity Probe combines a sealed 102-i...
| Authors | Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Akshara Prabhakar, Yu Li et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 July 2026 |
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