# What is Context Poisoning?

An attack in which malicious or false information is planted into an AI agent's memory, RAG index, or tool outputs so the model treats it as ground truth.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/context-poisoning/
Last updated: 2026-04-10

---

Unlike prompt injection, which ends when a session closes, context poisoning persists: the payload is written into sources the agent reads on every future run, such as a vector index, long-term memory store, or shared multi-agent workspace. It is classified as ASI06 in the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026. The root cause is a context engineering failure, since most agent pipelines ingest, store, and retrieve content without provenance tracking, source isolation, or trust boundaries.

## Related terms

- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)
- [rag](https://usewire.io/glossary/rag/)
- [ai-agent](https://usewire.io/glossary/ai-agent/)
- [multi-agent-system](https://usewire.io/glossary/multi-agent-system/)
- [context-container](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-container/)