VEPA is a framework that enables the verified evolution of formal guardrails for lifelong large language model agents. It represents guardrails as formal policies of symbolic rules over typed agent events, and during deployment uses LLM‑guided feedback to propose policy patches that fix new failures while preserving correct behavior. A deterministic verifier accepts only structurally valid, conflict‑free policies, and an evidence‑aware authority layer activates verified rules only when sufficient supporting evidence exists, ensuring that uncertain updates do not directly affect guardrail decisions.
By Duy Nguyen, Lesly Miculicich, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Shuo Li, Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham, Mohit Bansal, Tomas Pfister, Long T. Le
The paper investigates how multiple pre‑action controls—authority, resource, and evidence gates—interact in agentic AI systems. It formalizes remediation‑induced control coupling, showing that remediation can invalidate earlier judgments and that the order of remediation matters. The authors propose a remediate‑and‑regate protocol to restore soundness, analyze non‑commuting remediation operators, and demonstrate the approach on a deterministic open‑data artifact with three published engines.
By Gaston Besanson
arXiv:2608.21423v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agentic security uses large-language-model (LLM) agents to plan, dispatch, and interpret security tools. As these systems move from demonstrations to...
By Israt Moyeen Noumi, Tarannum Ahmed Nowshin, Md. Mehedi Hasan Nipu, Mohammad Sakib Mahmood, Md. Jakir Hossain, M. F. Mridha
arXiv:2607. 23532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Swarms of LLM-assisted autonomous robots are increasingly proposed for cooperative intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) in contested environments.
By Nikolaos Kekatos, Stylianos Basagiannis, Panagiotis Katsaros, Alexios Lekidis, Tom Nianios
ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).
By Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng, Chang Jin, An Wang, Xiaokun Luan, Zhixiao Lin, Jingjing Qu, Xia Hu, Xingcheng Xu
arXiv:2606. 29441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists.
By Subhadip Mitra
The paper evaluates a three‑part control stack— a 5‑Pillar runtime constitution, a 4‑tier swarm (Director, majority vote, Monitor, hard gate), and Cognitive Annealing—for multi‑agent LLM negotiation against an adversarial Gatekeeper. Experiments with Gemini 2.5 Pro agents and Claude Haiku 4.5 show that the constitution and Director improve framing but not reliability, the Monitor and hard gate do not reduce unlocks, and deterministic recovery via atomic purge and a canonical strike successfully resolves deadlocks while keeping call budgets unchanged. The study demonstrates that the stack can recover from deadlocks without additional model cost, though it does not reduce overall call or token usage as initially hypothesized.
By Masaaki Nakatsu (AO, Inc. / OrbLabs AG), Reno Wang (AO, Inc.)
arXiv:2605. 08442v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We discover that prompt-injection success and tool-execution success are separable safety properties: defenses that block injection do not necessarily block execution, and vice versa.
By Jun Wen Leong
arXiv:2609.36570v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Indirect prompt injection makes an LLM agent treat untrusted retrieved text as instructions. We present CounterSteer, an inference-time defense that...
By Mark Russinovich
The paper introduces APEX, an active defense for large language model agents that protects against indirect prompt injection by enforcing safety at execution boundaries. APEX uses an evidence‑gated prevention contract and deception‑based exposure to ensure that only authorized effects, endorsed by the task, are executed. Evaluation shows APEX achieves near‑zero attack success across multiple benchmarks and capability‑unit types, outperforming 13 baseline defenses.
By Xinran Zheng, Xin Fan Guo, Zhiqiang Hao, Fan Yang, Xingzhi Qian, Jiawei Du, Jinfeng Xu, Zheng Xing, Shuo Yang, Xingjun Wang
arXiv:2605.09504v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We show that the instruments used to measure AI offensive capability fail in two ways: (i) they overstate harm, and (ii) they credit the mode...
By Michael Alexander Riegler, Finn Schwall, Annika Willoch Olstad, Birk Sebastian Frostelid Torpmann-Hagen, Sushant Gautam, Klas H. Pettersen, Inga Str\"umke
arXiv:2606. 07808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction.
By Sanjay Kariyappa, G. Edward Suh