Best Friends, Not Forever: Evaluating Long-Horizon Persona Collapse and Behavioral Drift in AI Companions

arXiv cs.AIAugust 3, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2607.28818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI companions increasingly mediate repeated social interaction, users may rely on a stable role and shared history, yet locally acceptable replies do not ensure that either persists. We study two observable long-horizon failures: 'persona collapse', the loss of a deployed role, boundaries, values, or style, and 'behavioral drift', the gradual or recurrent erosion of those properties. We introduce ANCHOR, a controlled synthetic audit that separately measures persona enactment and trajectory recall. The study contains 2,008 conversations spanning 27 personas, nine interaction schedules, three generated memory settings, and four evaluated model

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