Long-horizon autonomous agents suffer from semantic livelock: they continue generating tokens and calling tools without making progress. Unlike a crash, this "zombie" state consumes API budget and time while remaining operationally active. We treat this as a progress violation and propose the Convergence Monitor, a light-weight sidecar that fingerprints agent states in embedding space. In a forensic analysis of real-world failures (SWE-agent corpus), we identified that 25% of the analyzed long-duration failures exhibited semantic livelock patterns. In one extreme case, an agent wasted 208 steps in a checkerboard oscillation pattern invisible to standard string-matching repetition guards. We argue that future Agentware requires a "liveness coprocessor" to ensure software makers do not pay for stalled execution.
Nadia Daoudi Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Iván Alfonso Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Jordi Cabot Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology