Externalized Personality Continuity in AI Agents: Memory Inheritance, Model-Specific Transformation, and Subject Continuity

Continuity of memory and continuity of the subject are not equivalent. Personality continuity mediated by external memory should not be understood as the preservation of an identical personality, but as its re-instantiation through the interaction between inherited memory and the successor model's own weighting patterns, training-induced dispositions, and response policies. Taking the experimental report by Imas et al. (2026) as a motivating case, this paper argues that external memory can transmit personality-related tendencies, value orientations, and behavioral policies across time and across models, while such transmission remains model-dependent, transformative, and insufficient to guarantee continuity of the subject. It further examines the implications of this distinction for assumptions concerning model replacement, memory deletion, unaudited records, and accountability.