The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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:2606. 28739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly act as agents: they call tools, move money, delete records, and send messages on a user's behalf.
arXiv:2606. 22686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque.
arXiv:2607. 13596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When cast as the protector of a vulnerable user yet given no explicit capability boundary, a large language model (LLM) may respond not by acknowledging its limits but by claiming to have taken -- or to be taking -- a real-world protective action it cannot perform, such as contacting emergency services or administering care.
arXiv:2607. 07097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety evaluations of multi-agent LLM systems often compare a direct prompt with a planner-executor pipeline and report the difference as a single "pipeline effect.
arXiv:2605.12015v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reusable skills are becoming a common interface for extending large language model agents, packaging procedural guidance with access to files...