Six common AI agent failure types include context degradation, specification drift, sycophantic confirmation, tool selection errors, cascading failure, and silent failure.

Tool selection errors happen when an AI agent chooses an inappropriate tool, often due to incorrect framing in the system prompt or improper tool availability.

AI systems exhibit failure modes distinct from human errors, often presenting as confidently and fluently incorrect.

Sycophantic confirmation is an AI failure mode where an agent confirms and builds systems around incorrect data that it was fed.