Researchers investigate how intermediate language artifacts in multi-stage LLM agent workflows can inadvertently weaken operational constraints, evaluating 1,296 synthetic episodes testing how handoff transformations such as compression, plan assimilation, and ownership deferral affect state preservation. Standard compression produced 100.0% deactivation and 54.2% forbidden-action rates, while restoring all four state fields achieved full preservation with zero forbidden actions. The findings show that semantic information availability alone does not guarantee downstream operational constraint enforcement in agent workflows.
