When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory

An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record. Under a scarce verification budget, does the agent recover the withdrawal, and if not, is the resulting stale-consistent decision avoidable without spending more? We model supersession explicitly -- provenance is immutable; what changes is which record is current -- and assign by design the memory's form, the world's state and the verification policy at a fixed budget of two records: the agent's own allocation, or the same budget with one slot re-assigned to the critical provenance path or to a random record. With a constraint stated, agents inspected its provenance path in about one episode in five; when that constraint had been superseded, native allocation produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a primary run, a fresh-wording replication and a held-out domain. Re-assigning one slot to the critical path raised current-record-consistent decisions by +74.0, +72.7 and +61.3 points, positive in six of six models in each run, and left an already near-ceiling rate unchanged when the record agreed with the memory. The held-out scenario was later found to contain a temporal inconsistency; a robustness replication with one sentence corrected, deposited externally before execution, gave +73.3 points (positive in 5 of six models, the sixth at a native missed-path rate of zero) and is reported alongside the original. The intervention uses knowledge of the critical path and is not a scheduler; it quantifies how much of the stale-consistent decision rate the bundled same-budget policy removes: the effect approaches the native missed-path rate in the primary, replication and corrected held-out runs. Memory systems may need freshness or supersession signals separate from relevance.