Definition
What is Context Drift?
Last updated
The gradual loss of task-relevant information as an AI agent's context window fills with accumulated history.
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.
All terms
View full glossary Agent Drift AI Agent AI Hallucination AI Second Brain Context as a Service Context Compression Context Container Context Drift Context Engineering Context Offloading Context Poisoning Context Portability Context Rot Context Window Epistemic Provenance Fine-Tuning MCP Resources MCP Server MCP (Model Context Protocol) Multi-Agent System Prompt Caching Prompt Engineering RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Semantic Search Structured Context Tool Poisoning Wire
Put context into practice
Create your first context container and connect it to your AI tools in minutes.
Create Your First Container