Definition

What is Context Poisoning?

Last updated

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.

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 Context Engineering RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) AI Agent Multi-Agent System Context Container

Further reading

Articles about Context Poisoning

Anthropic's Managed Agents memory: what it changes

Anthropic launched Memory for Managed Agents on April 23, 2026 in public beta. What the design means for agent scope, freshness, and context engineering.

Tool poisoning: how MCP tool descriptions hijack agents

Tool poisoning hides instructions inside MCP tool descriptions the agent reads as trusted context. The MCPTox benchmark recorded a 72.8% attack success rate.

Context Poisoning: When Bad Data Becomes AI Ground Truth

Context poisoning plants false data into an AI agent's memory or RAG index. The model treats it as truth. It's a context engineering problem, not a model bug.

All terms

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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

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