Embodiment drift is captured calibration at the scale of a project, institution, or law. A thing can keep looking successful while the standard it is actually serving quietly changes — habits, compromise, fatigue, shortcuts, money, approval, and reputation displacing the original living aim one accommodation at a time.
It is the practical cousin of ontological drift: where ontological drift is a purpose that has stopped corresponding to what matters, embodiment drift is a purpose that is still right and a practice that has stopped carrying it. A healthcare system that genuinely intends universal care and delivers impossible forms and inaccessible appointments has not drifted in purpose — it has drifted in embodiment. Because output metrics often still look fine, only a review aimed at fidelity rather than delivery will catch it — which is why the model builds embodiment review into projects and institutions and asks, of any procedure, what was this trying to embody?