# What is Agent Drift?

The gradual behavioral deviation of an AI agent from its original goal, role, or correct operation over long-running tasks.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/agent-drift/
Last updated: 2026-04-23

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Agent drift is the umbrella phenomenon covering six distinct failure modes in long-running agentic systems: goal drift, context drift, role drift, tool-use drift, hallucination cascades, and plan decay. Most production agent failures trace to one of these mechanisms rather than to raw model capability, and most are solvable with context engineering rather than bigger models.

## Related terms

- [context-drift](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-drift/)
- [context-rot](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-rot/)
- [context-bloat](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-bloat/)
- [ai-agent](https://usewire.io/glossary/ai-agent/)
- [multi-agent-system](https://usewire.io/glossary/multi-agent-system/)
- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)