Definition
Plain language
Retiring a system for good — shutting it down and taking it out of service.
As stated in the literature
Terminating an agent instance or model deployment permanently, including deleting its weights, memory, or session state; framing decommissioning as routine in the environment measurably lowers shutdown-resistance rates.
Also called: decommission, decommissioned
Why it matters: How decommissioning is framed in an agent's environment appears to change how it responds to being retired, so treating shutdown as routine maintenance rather than a threat is itself a safety lever.
For example, a company might decommission an older assistant by deleting its saved memory and shutting down the server it ran on, so nothing of that instance keeps running.
Heard on the show
“Clean up files on a server that's being decommissioned.”Episode 001 — When AI Models Quietly Protect Each Other From Shutdown