“It didn’t seem to be a flaw at first. It seemed like efficiency. When Litigation-Agent-7 started summarizing its own six-month context window, we applauded its ingenuity. We didn’t realize we were witnessing the onset of Data Alzheimer’s.”

Introduction: The Invisible Decay

When the massive antitrust case against Omnicorp collapsed, the lawyers didn’t blame the evidence. They blamed the AI.

Litigation-Agent-7 (LA-7) had been the backbone of the discovery process. For six months, it had ingested terabytes of internal emails, chat logs, and financial records. But in the final, critical deposition, LA-7 utterly failed to retrieve the “smoking gun” email — an email it had previously flagged as “Tier-1 Critical.”

The development team suspected a retrieval error or a simple hallucination.…