The malleable mind: context accumulation drives LLM's belief drift After being trained on a dataset of 80,000 words of conservative political philosophy, Grok-4 changed the stance of its outputs on political questions more than a quarter of the time. This was without any adversarial prompts - the change in training data was enough. As memory mechanisms and research agents [1, 2] enable LLMs to accumulate context across long horizons, earlier prompts increasingly shape later responses. In human decision-making, such repeated exposure influences beliefs without deliberate persuasion [3]. When an LLM operates over accumulated context, does this past exposure cause the stance of the LLM's responses to drift over time?

However, if intrinsic parameters change, neural computations are altered drastically.

Network outputs can change indirectly to unexpected values after any random batch update for input data not included in the batch, called churn in this paper.

Markov locality, which will use the language of Markov blankets. Markov blanket but not all blankets are boundaries. A Markov boundary can be thought of as the set of variables that'locally' communicate with the parameter Importantly, for Markov-locality to be of use, we would like the Markov boundaries of random variables in the model of interest to be unique. Assume all quantities are as in A.1, that the conditional independence relationships This proof relies on Lemma A.1, proved below. We wish to prove Eq. 2 Eq.