  We show that the directed landscape is a black noise in the sense of
Tsirelson and Vershik. As a corollary, we show that for any microscopic system
in which the height profile converges in law to the directed landscape, the
driving noise is asymptotically independent of the height profile. This
decoupling result provides one answer to the question of what happens to the
driving noise in the limit under the KPZ scaling, and illustrates a type of
noise sensitivity for systems in the KPZ universality class. Such decoupling
and sensitivity phenomena are not present in the intermediate-disorder or
weak-asymmetry regime, thus illustrating a contrast from the weak KPZ scaling
regime. Along the way, we prove a strong mixing property for the directed
landscape on a bounded time interval under spatial shifts, with a mixing rate
$\alpha(N)\leq Ce^{-dN^3}$ for some $C,d>0$.
