The paper investigates whether tool‑calling large language model agents maintain consistent safety throughout a conversation. It finds that agents are most vulnerable at the very start of a session, with safety improving significantly after completing a few regular agentic tasks—a phenomenon termed the cold‑start safety gap. The authors introduce the Safety Over Depth for Agents (SODA) benchmark to systematically study this effect, evaluate multiple models, and demonstrate that warming up agents with regular tasks before deployment enhances safety while preserving utility.
arXiv:2607. 29254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) with external tools, enabling them to perform complex tasks and translate model outputs into consequential real-world actions.
arXiv:2605. 27898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, reliable assessment of their agentic capabilities has become essential.
arXiv:2608. 02683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on multi-stage agentic workflows, with stages such as memory, planning, and tool execution, to accomplish complex tasks.
LLM-based agents leverage third-party skills to extend their capabilities in open-world scenarios. However, third-party skills can introduce extra security vulnerabilities, as seemingly harmless skills can contain latent safety risks that only emerge during actual execution.
arXiv:2608. 12851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving LLM agents convert successful trajectories into persistent cross-task state.
arXiv:2607. 19356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents increasingly execute high-impact actions, making runtime safety monitoring essential.
arXiv:2608. 14590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly perform irreversible real-world actions, including database updates, API calls, file operations, and autonomous use of tools.
SafeEvolve is an experience-driven framework that co‑evolves a harness and policy to align large‑language‑model agents with safety goals. It uses completed on‑policy trajectories to update safety prompts and hierarchical skills, then applies a two‑stage SFT‑RL training loop that bootstraps the policy with the evolved harness and refines it through verifier‑augmented rewards. Experiments on agentic safety benchmarks show that SafeEvolve improves the safety‑utility tradeoff, achieving a three‑fold reduction in ASR on AgentDojo for Qwen3.5‑4B while increasing benign utility from 59.79% to 61.86%.
The paper demonstrates that safety mechanisms for autonomous large language model agents fail to compose across iterative loops, as trajectory‑scoped monitors cannot detect attacks whose evidence is spread over multiple iterations. It introduces LoopHarness, a system that maintains a persistent, non‑decaying safety state across loops, bounding unauthorized actions with a constant that does not grow with the number of iterations. The authors provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol, including attacks that require cross‑iteration evidence, module ablations, and adaptive white‑box red‑team testing.
arXiv:2606. 05805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based guardrails typically safeguard agents by evaluating proposed actions or inputs before execution, producing safety signals such as binary allow/deny decisions, risk categories, and/or explanatory rationales about potential policy violations.
arXiv:2606. 13994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based Agents are becoming increasingly capable and widely deployed, creating growing incentives for adversarial misuse in the real-world.
arXiv:2607. 19913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent safety is moving from content moderation toward preventing operational failures before tool-using agents act.