CONTEXT_COLLAPSE (Layer 5 Emergency Compaction)
- Entity ID:
ent-20260419-e4f5a0b1c2d3 - Type:
concept - Scope:
shared - Status:
active - Aliases: CONTEXT_COLLAPSE, layer-5-compaction, emergency-compaction, employee-only-collapse
Description
Fifth and deepest layer of the compaction hierarchy: an emergency-only hidden API call available exclusively in Anthropic employee builds (feature-gated on USER_TYPE==='ant'). Behavior and trigger conditions are undocumented outside Anthropic; community analyses (ccunpacked.dev) confirm the symbol exists but no one has observed its runtime. Listed as one of the 64 still-unnamed gated modules as of April 7, 2026. Presumed to be a catastrophic-fallback summarization path when Autocompact (Layer 4) has itself failed or exceeded budget.
Key claims
- Compaction has five layers, not two
- Five pre-model context shapers run sequentially before every model call
- Context Collapse is read-time projection, non-destructive
Relations
- Five-Layer Compaction Architecture --[contains]--> CONTEXT_COLLAPSE (Layer 5 Emergency Compaction)
- CONTEXT_COLLAPSE (Layer 5 Emergency Compaction) --[depends_on]--> USER_TYPE === 'ant' Gate