the-agent-governance-gap
Constraint Decay: The System Prompt Is Not a Contract
There is now empirical evidence for something that governance practitioners suspected but could not quantify: AI agents lose their grip on constraints the more complex the task becomes. This is, in the annals of things-we-probably-should-have-tested-before-deployment, a fairly significant entry. A paper published in May 2026, "Constraint Decay: The Fragility