Contamination Inheritance

Term coined by Samar Ansari (2026) for the failure mode where an LLM reproduces a citation error not because it hallucinated independently, but because it learned the error from an earlier AI-contaminated text in its training data — one paper's fabricated citation inherited by a later model's output.

Watching: currently documented in one traced case (claim-ansari-2026-contamination-inheritance-citation-error-propagates-across-models); graduates to a full hub if a second, independent source names or measures the same mechanism.