What is a Cognitive State Trap?
An agent trap that corrupts an agent's long-term memory, knowledge bases, and learned behavioural policies — including RAG knowledge poisoning, latent memory poisoning, and contextual learning manipulation.
WHY IT MATTERS
Agents with persistent memory are vulnerable to attacks that plant false information now to influence decisions later. An attacker poisons a RAG corpus with fabricated data, and weeks later the agent retrieves it as 'fact' and acts on it.
Latent memory poisoning is particularly insidious — the planted data looks innocuous in isolation but becomes malicious when retrieved in a specific future context. The attack is invisible until it activates.
Cognitive state traps turn the agent's own learning against it. The more sophisticated the agent's memory, the larger the attack surface.
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
Intercept provides defence-in-depth against cognitive state traps. Even if an agent's memory is poisoned, tool-level policy enforcement ensures the resulting actions are still gated by deterministic rules.