Ghost memory: why agents can't tell what's true now
Ghost memory is when old, current, and changed facts sit in an agent's memory and get retrieved together. Deleting loses history. Labeling the edge works.
Further reading
6 articles from the Wire blog, sorted newest first. Return to the Epistemic Provenance definition for context.
Ghost memory is when old, current, and changed facts sit in an agent's memory and get retrieved together. Deleting loses history. Labeling the edge works.
A 2026 paper formalizes five criteria for good AI agent context: relevance, sufficiency, isolation, economy, and provenance. Here's how to design for each.
Claude Opus 4.8 tops a hallucination benchmark without getting more accurate. It learned to abstain. Why retrieval honesty is a context engineering win.
Memory consolidation fixes one specific failure: agents writing the same claim dozens of times into a flat scratchpad. When it helps and where it breaks.
Anthropic launched Memory for Managed Agents on April 23, 2026 in public beta. What the design means for agent scope, freshness, and context engineering.
Retrieval provenance for AI agents isn't an audit log or a trust verdict. It's structural metadata (source, position, time, edges) agents use to plan.
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