Two failure modes I caught in my AI lab in one day. Both involve the system silently lying about its own state.

I operate an autonomous lab of evolutionary trading agents. Yesterday I found two bugs that look superficially different but are actually the same class of problem. Sharing because both affect autonomous AI systems specifically and most builders don't see them coming. **Failure mode 1: circular validation.** Setup. 69 real decisions made by the system over 58 days. Standard retrospective evaluation: label each decision as correct, false alarm, or ambiguous based on what happened next. Result. 94% labelled as correct. Looked great. Why it was wrong.