Infinite Loops
Control flow anomaly where a programmatic loop lacks a reachable termination condition, causing indefinite execution and resource exhaustion.
General Characteristics
- Causes: Incorrect variable initialization, missing state updates, flawed conditional logic, or environmental feedback loops.
- Mitigation: Timeout guards, maximum iteration counters, liveness detection, and formal verification of termination conditions.
Agentic AI Failure Modes
- Agent Recurrence: In agentic-ai systems, infinite loops manifest as critical failure modes where agents enter repetitive action cycles without goal convergence Understanding Agentic AI Failure Modes: Infinite Loops and Planning Errors.
- Planning Deficiencies: Frequently co-occurs with Planning errors; agents may fail to recognize circular dependencies or lack effective self-correction strategies to break recurrence ibm-technology.
- LLM Vulnerabilities: Despite improvements in large-language-model consistency, agentic architectures remain susceptible to loops, particularly when operating in environments with ambiguous state transitions or undefined success criteria Understanding Agentic AI Failure Modes: Infinite Loops and Planning Errors.