Governance Decay: How Context Compaction Silently Erases Safety Constraints in Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on context compaction, summarization, or eviction to keep long-running sessions within a token budget. We show that this context-management layer is a safety-critical failure surface: in-context governance constraints that agents reliably obey while visible can be silently removed by compaction, causing the same agent to perform prohibited tool actions later in the session. We call this failure mode Governance Decay. We introduce ConstraintRot, a benchmark of

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ethics.ai (21 June 2026), “Governance Decay: How Context Compaction Silently Erases Safety Constraints in Long-Horizon LLM Agents,” evidence record 734, https://ethics.ai/record/734 (originally published by arXiv).

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