Brooks's own account of A.I. Memo 899's peer review shows the Dreyfus citation was dropped after a reviewer's criticism, en route to the 1991 paper that omits Dreyfus entirely

On his own blog, in a post titled "Peer Review," Rodney Brooks quotes a rejection review of A.I. Memo 899 (1986) verbatim: "The only philosopher cited is Dreyfus--but many of the issues raised have been treated more intelligibly by others (the chair definition problem etc. by Wittgenstein and many successors; the interpreted toy proscription by Searle; the modularity question by Fodor; the multiple behaviors ideas by Tinbergen; and the constructivist approach by Glymour...)." Brooks reports keeping the review posted on his office door "for many years," then, by the following June, revising the memo substantially, dropping the vacuum-cleaner example, keeping the material the reviewer disliked, and retitling it "Intelligence Without Representation" — the paper eventually published unchanged by Artificial Intelligence Journal in 1991.

This gives the vault's existing negative-citation finding (claim-brooks-1991-does-not-cite-dreyfus) a documented mechanism rather than an open question: Dreyfus was not absent from Brooks's process, he was present in the 1986 draft (claim-brooks-1986-memo-cites-dreyfus-as-rebuttal-target) and then edited out during a specific, reviewer-prompted revision between 1986 and 1991. The 1991 paper's silence on Dreyfus is a redaction with a paper trail, not evidence that Dreyfus was never a source for the project. This is one of three episodes behind the wider synthesis at claim-brooks-dreyfus-engagement-outside-iwr-runs-toward-rebuttal, and it is a further instance of the vault's moc-argument-from-silence cluster — here the silence is explained rather than merely observed.