AI Governance Engineer
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Catastrophic forgetting

By Updated

The tendency of neural networks to lose earlier competence when trained on new tasks 1. It is a reason every retraining is a change event that re-runs the full eval suite, not only the tests for the new capability.

Developed in
ch. 11, Eight characteristics that break classic IT governance
Chapters
ch. 11, AI Defined
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Catastrophic forgetting: mentions per chapter1 mention of the term across 1 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapter11 AI Defined: 1 mention11 AI Defined1No mentions in the other 22 chaptersSource: the Body of Knowledgev0.5.0
Catastrophic forgetting: mentions per chapter1 mention of the term across 1 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapter0001020304050607081011 AI Defined: 1 mention111121314151617181920212223Source: the Body of Knowledge v0.5.0
Mentions per chapter How often each chapter names the term, with the chapters the glossary cross-references drawn solid. The longest bar is where to read the term in use; bars spread across many chapters mark a term that runs through the discipline.
Mentions as a table
Mentions of Catastrophic forgetting per chapter
ChapterMentionsCross-referenced
00 Preface0No
01 Definition0No
02 Why Now0No
03 Values & Principles0No
04 The Stack0No
05 Patterns0No
06 The Role0No
07 Maturity Model0No
08 Regulatory Map0No
10 Reading List0No
11 AI Defined1Yes
12 Governance Program0No
13 Risk Management0No
14 Development0No
15 Deployment0No
16 Fairness & XAI0No
17 Incidents0No
18 EU AI Act0No
19 Privacy & AI0No
20 Existing Law0No
21 AI Laws Worldwide0No
22 Principles & Standards0No
23 AI Agents0No
  • Dual use

    The capacity of the same AI capability to serve harmful ends as well as legitimate ones, for example a toxicity model inverted to propose toxic molecules.

  • Opacity

    The inability of a person to follow how a system reached an output.

Sources

  1. [1] Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks (networks lose earlier competence when trained on new tasks; arXiv 1612.00796). Kirkpatrick et al.. 2016-12-02. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00796 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Catastrophic forgetting. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/catastrophic-forgetting. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026catastrophicforgetting,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Catastrophic forgetting}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/catastrophic-forgetting}
}