A provider quietly updated the base model. The API is formally the same, the version string is unchanged — but behavior shifted: Kovcheg started inventing loan terms not present in the documents slightly more often, and treating applications from one region slightly more strictly. No one changed anything in the code. A month later it surfaces as a spike in complaints and a question from compliance: "Why have approvals in region N dropped?" This is what silent degradation looks like — the most common way an AI system's quality erodes without a single deployment.
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