Why missing time-of-day signals cause AI systems to misorder same-day updates. “Why is AI telling me the evacuation order is still active when the city lifted it this morning?” The answer appears confident. It cites an official update dated today. It references the correct agency. It presents the information as current. But the order was rescinded hours earlier. The AI system has selected an earlier update from the same day and treated it as the latest version of events. The timeline has collapsed into a single undifferentiated point, and the result is wrong. How AI Systems Reconstruct Time Without Sequence AI systems do not read government information as a continuous narrative. They retrieve fragments from multiple sources, extract relevant statements, and recombine them into a synthesized response. During this process, structural signals that indicate sequence—such as the precise timing of updates—are often absent or incomplete.…