Everything on AI Quality & Safety

Recursive training on model outputs creates an 'Ouroboros' effect where minor prompt anomalies cascade into systemic pollution, exemplified by the OpenAI goblin incident. This 'agentic telephone' phenomenon causes intention drift, where small context shifts morph into strategic errors within agent orchestrators.

Impact: Organizations risk output corruption and reliability failures if they do not treat prompt provenance as a data integrity issue and implement regular harness audits.

— from AI Agent Safety, Drift, and Productivity Gaps · Dev Interrupted· May 08, 2026