# What is Context Drift?

The gradual loss of task-relevant information as an AI agent's context window fills with accumulated history.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/context-drift/
Last updated: 2026-03-31

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Context drift occurs when new tool outputs, observations, and messages push critical information like the original task goal or early decisions out of the model's effective attention range. Unlike hitting a token limit, drift degrades performance silently. Studies attribute 65% of enterprise agent failures to context drift during multi-step reasoning rather than raw context exhaustion.

## Related terms

- [context-rot](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-rot/)
- [context-compression](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-compression/)
- [context-window](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-window/)
- [ai-agent](https://usewire.io/glossary/ai-agent/)