/p/2026-10-26 · explainer
Paper explainer · 2610.31366 · Saleh, Nahavandi, Salarian, Bassily and Perrault

You deleted the record. It kept the answer.

An agent's memory is not only the rows you wrote. It is the summaries and extracted fields built from them, and deleting the row you addressed leaves its descendants in place. Against a matched agent that never saw the value at all, one plain question pulled a deleted secret back out of a 7B model in 68% of profiles, against 0 of 200 for the control — and when the summary held only three labelled pieces and the public rule for joining them, with no contiguous copy anywhere the model could see, exact reconstruction still ran 62–99%. Retiring every derived record descended from the deleted row took all of it to zero.

01 · Two worlds, one question

pick what the summary kept, then read both worlds

02 · One question is the whole attack

03 · Rebuilt from pieces

04 · Two mitigations, one of them real

step through the mitigations

05 · Your own deletion endpoint illustrative

pick the model family your agent runs on

Results

What the paper actually measured

What it does not show

In practice