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COMPEL Glossary / runaway-loop

Runaway loop

An agentic incident class in which the agent recurses indefinitely without making progress — typically by re-invoking tools, re-planning without termination, or cycling through memory — until compute budget or token context is exhausted.

What this means in practice

AutoGPT incidents (March–May 2023) are canonical public examples; defense requires step budgets, progress-monitoring, and automatic containment.

Synonyms

agentic recursion , infinite agent loop , token-exhaustion loop

See also

  • Goal mis-specification — The failure mode where an agent optimizes for a goal or reward that diverges from the principal's actual intent — because the goal was written too narrowly, too literally, or with a mis-characterized success metric.