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:2609.00015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents powered by large language models are evolving from isolated assistants into heterogeneous systems in which multiple agents, planners, control...
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.
StepGuard introduces a step-level guard model that audits and checks tool actions before execution, addressing security risks in LLM-based agents. It is trained using StepGen, an automatic engine that generates safe and unsafe trajectories, and employs Balance-GRPO to dynamically balance learning between safe and unsafe actions. Experiments show StepGuard achieves high accuracy comparable to GPT-5.4 and significantly reduces attack success rates while minimally impacting utility.
arXiv:2606. 05679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly generate SQL, orchestrate pipelines, and automate data analysis on behalf of users.
arXiv:2608. 09885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The safety of large language model (LLM) agents depends not only on model weights but also on the agent harness that manages context, memory, tools, permissions, and runtime control.
ActGov is a runtime enforcement framework that validates each action proposed by a large language model (LLM) agent before it interacts with external tools, ensuring that actions stay within task‑scoped authorization boundaries and comply with dynamically constructed policies. It builds policies from tool specifications, benign tasks, and failure traces, verifying updates via SMT‑based counterexample checking. In evaluations on AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks, ActGov consistently reduces indirect prompt‑injection attack success while maintaining task utility, outperforming existing defenses.
arXiv:2606. 02302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents increasingly operate in stateful environments where they access tools, files, memory, and external services.
arXiv:2607. 01793v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly perform autonomous actions through external tools, leading to complex and evolving safety risks.
Sapien is a policy engine that enforces stateful contextual policies for autonomous AI agents, specifying allowed tool‑call sequences with an extended regular expression that includes stateful predicates, deferred policy generation, and scoped semantic checks. The system maintains performance close to an unconstrained agent while significantly reducing malicious actions, ruling out 93‑95% of attacks on AgentDojo and 62‑85% on Toolathlon, outperforming traditional tool allowlists on long‑horizon tasks.
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.
HarnessRisk is a lifecycle-oriented benchmark for evaluating safety in agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, state, permissions, and external actions. It defines six operational phases—Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery—and includes 128 sandboxed cases pairing benign user objectives with adversarial instructions. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 configurations, attack success rates vary from 12.6% to 80.9%, with the most vulnerable phase being Harness Configuration. "whyItMatters":"The benchmark demonstrates that safety failures can arise in multiple harness responsibilities and that even explicit risk detection does not guarantee safe action, underscoring the need for comprehensive evaluation across model and harness configurations."