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# False closure risk

False closure risk is the likelihood that an agent confidently answers from stale or superseded context because the system cannot distinguish resolved decisions from open questions. The agent retrieves a relevant-looking fact, treats it as current, and delivers it with full confidence, even when the decision was revised months ago.

## Before vs after

Before: an ops team asks “What is our contractor access policy?” The agent retrieves the Q3 draft discussion, not the November board-approved version, and answers confidently. The team acts on an outdated policy. After: Neotoma’s versioned observations preserve both the draft and the final decision with timestamps and provenance. The reducer surfaces the latest resolved state; the agent can trace that the Q3 draft was superseded.

\# View the full observation history for a policy entity
neotoma observations list --entity-id <policy\_entity\_id>

# The snapshot reflects the latest resolved state
neotoma entities search --query "contractor access policy" --type policy

False closure is prevented by the combination of [versioned history](/versioned-history), [auditable change logs](/auditable-change-log), and [deterministic state evolution](/deterministic-memory). Where [silent mutation](/silent-mutation-risk) describes data changing without a trail, false closure describes stale data being served as if it were current. See also [conflicting facts risk](/conflicting-facts-risk).