A note on nonunital absorbing extensions

Elliott and Kucerovsky stated that a nonunital extension of separable C*-algebras with a stable ideal is nuclearly absorbing if and only if the extension is purely large. However, their proof was flawed. We give a counterexample to their theorem as stated, but establish an equivalent formulation of nuclear absorption under a very mild additional assumption to being purely large. In particular, if the quotient algebra is nonunital, then we show that the original theorem applies. We also examine how this affects results in classification theory.