Research agent test exposes RAG's hidden problem: 'multiple sources' often trace back to one observation
edalgomezn · reddit · 2026-09-14
A developer building MENDEL, a research agent, found a common flaw in search + RAG + agent systems during testing. Tasked with investigating Dario Amodei's essay We Must Pace the Frontier, the agent surfaced multiple seemingly corroborating articles — but provenance reconstruction showed they all descended from one organization's original data and analysis. Document-wise: 5-10 sources; epistemically: a single observation of the world.
The team now models four dimensions of independence (source, data, methodology, original contribution) instead of a global trust score, so the agent can flag that URLs citing the same dataset only appear to corroborate each other.
A second test shifted the agent's initial hypothesis: risk appears to depend on the whole system — tools, permissions, memory, network access, persistence, autonomy, oversight — not model capability alone, suggesting model-only evaluation is too crude for real agentic systems. The author asks whether others explicitly model inter-source dependency in RAG pipelines.
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