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memory injection

noun

also agent memory injection or LLM memory injection or memory injection attack

TopicSafety & Ethics First known use2025 Senses1

Definition of memory injection

: an attack that causes an AI agent or assistant to store attacker-controlled information or instructions in persistent memory so that they can influence its behavior in later conversations or tasks
- The security team tested whether a malicious email could cause memory injection and alter the agent's behavior days later.
- Unlike a prompt injection that affects only the current interaction, the memory injection survived the end of the chat.

Origin & history

first known use2025

The AI-security sense became established in 2025 through research on Memory INJection Attacks, or MINJA, against LLM agents. Later studies examined one-interaction attacks, indirect attacks delivered through external content, and malicious records that remain dormant until a related query retrieves them.

Usage note

Memory injection targets the information an agent saves and retrieves, not the model's weights. It may be delivered through an ordinary conversation, a document, an email, a webpage, or another untrusted source that the agent is allowed to remember. The attack is especially dangerous because the harmful instruction or false fact can persist across sessions and activate long after the original input has disappeared from the context window. Memory poisoning is often used as an overlapping term, although poisoning emphasizes the corrupted state of the memory while injection emphasizes how the malicious record is planted. Defenses include treating retrieved memories as untrusted input, recording their provenance, restricting automatic memory writes, separating memory by user and task, and making stored memories reviewable and removable.

Editorial references

Sources & further reading

4 sources

Memory Injection Attacks on LLM Agents via Query-Only Interaction arXiv · 2025-03-05
InjecMEM: Memory Injection Attack on LLM Agent Memory Systems arXiv · 2026-08-24
Experts find AI agents can be tricked into 'remembering' fake facts for months - so how do we stop it? TechRadar
Memory Injection AI Agent Threat Matrix

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Cite this entry

"Memory injection." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/memory-injection/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2026.

Definition of memory injection

Origin & history

Sources & further reading

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