arXiv:2608.04012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly expected to operate over repeated cycles of interaction, adaptation, and update rather than through isolated one-shot outputs. This raises a fundamental theoretical question: can an AI system persist indefinitely without incurring unbounded structural aging? This paper develops a long-run persistence framework for AI systems based on the redundancy-adjusted Artificial Age Score (AAS). The model extends AAS from a static evaluative measure into a cycle-level functional that generates an age sequence across repeated operation. At each cycle, structural age is defined through a weighted, redundancy-aware logarithmic penalty over component consistency levels. Within this framework, cycle-level age is shown to be well defined and uniformly bounded, thereby excluding explosive pointwise aging. On this basis, the paper defines a hierarchy of asymptotic regimes, including burdened persistence, zero...