arXiv:2607. 13070v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety claims for self-improving agent runtimes are almost always self-graded: a policy file, a guardrail, a promise in a README.
By Deepak Soni
arXiv:2607. 07405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents can violate the very policies they are deployed to enforce while appearing to complete the task successfully.
By Vikas Reddy, Sumanth Reddy Challaram, Abhishek Basu
arXiv:2607. 00871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents violate the assumption behind most learning-theoretic guarantees: the data, evaluator, components, and hypothesis space are produced by the policy being updated.
By Biswa Sengupta
The paper proves that algorithmic safety verification for Turing‑complete, self‑modifying systems—whether fixed or recursively self‑improving—is fundamentally limited. Statistically, no verifier can be sound, complete, and tractable across unbounded domains, all finite configurations, or succinctly described finite environments, due to Rice’s, Gödel’s, Trakhtenbrot’s, coNP, and PSPACE barriers. Dynamically, even a single self‑modification step can render safety properties undecidable, and no total supervisory algorithm can guarantee correctness for all such transformations, though a monitor that raises alarms on violations remains feasible.
whyItMatters":"The results show that formal safety guarantees for recursive self‑improvement are unattainable, highlighting intrinsic verification barriers for advanced AI systems."
By Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita
The paper introduces a self‑healing harness that enforces admission control over language‑model agents’ self‑modifications. The harness runs a Detect‑Notice‑Heal‑Validate loop, allowing agents to propose rule changes that are only granted persistent authority after demonstrating improvement on a failure case without regressing on protected cases. Across 16 benchmark runs, the harness rejected many locally beneficial proposals that caused collateral regressions, while improving task‑completion scores and reliability.
By Sina Tayebati, Divake Kumar, Nastaran Darabi, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
arXiv:2606. 26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are granted access to tools, APIs, and other infrastructure, making them active principals in those systems.
By Seth Dobrin, {\L}ukasz Chmiel
arXiv:2607. 22868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Runtime guardrails act before irreversible tool calls, but their guarantees depend on what policy state is representable, what a judge observes, and whether intervention changes future behavior.
By Shawn Ray
arXiv:2609.06036v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Proposal-based controllers---learned policies, language-model planners, and other black-box \emph{generators}---are increasingly deployed behind runtim...
By Guangxi Wan, Yongbo Xie, Yuqi Liu, Qingwei Dong, Qingxin Li, Hongfei Bai, Peng Zeng
The paper introduces a formal framework for agent harnesses that guarantees termination, prevents drift, and enforces spend limits through bounded loops, gates, and repair relations. It proves that these guarantees hold even with repair budgets and demonstrates the effectiveness of the system by identifying vacuous gates and achieving low false‑accept rates in a 69‑loop catalogue. The authors provide an instrumented implementation and a held‑out mutant corpus to validate gate correctness.
By Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap Bhardwaj
arXiv:2606. 28639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish the mathematical limits of AGI safety in two forms: verifying a fixed system, and verifying that a certified safety property persists once the system self-modifies.
By Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita
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.
By Chenhao Wu, Haoxuan Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang, Yuhan Lin, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Shang Luo, Kefu Xu, Jifeng Zhu, Bin Chong
arXiv:2607. 10487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can commit durable effects from authority evidence that was valid earlier in execution: a DOM snapshot, approval epoch, version witness, branch token, or worker result.
By Igor Santos-Grueiro