A Competing-Hazards Systematization of Loss of Control in Autonomous Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
arXiv:2607. 19292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current AI safety discourse still focuses disproportionately on visible failures, including obvious harms, dramatic misuse, and hypothetical catastrophic scenarios.
arXiv:2607. 18366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution.
arXiv:2609.16305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long-horizon interactions involving tool use, persistent state, evolving authorization, and...
arXiv:2609. 11030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly act through tools and delegated authority, but general incident repositories rarely capture the mechanisms needed to compare public failures with agent-security evaluations.
The study evaluates how large language model agents maintain consistency over extended interactions by simulating a 20‑step delayed‑gratification task. Researchers ran 84,540 trajectories across eight model families, using survival analysis to track when agents first claim a reward and discrete‑time hazard regression to assess how factors like social visibility, persona stressors, and deliberation policy affect failure risk. They also developed a seven‑category taxonomy from 13,780 deliberation traces, revealing that early failures are impulse‑driven, later ones are fatigue‑ or cost‑benefit‑framed, and public settings elicit norm‑oriented justifications; longer deliberation correlates with higher intra‑rationale contradictions, challenging assumptions about reasoning depth and consistency.
arXiv:2410. 22526v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To effectively address potential harms from Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, it is essential to identify and mitigate system-level hazards.