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arxiv:2610.13623

APEX-Harm: Evaluating Agent Safety in Shared Professional Workspaces

Published on Oct 9
ยท Submitted by
Ziyi Yang
on Oct 15
Authors:
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Abstract

APEX-Harm evaluates long-horizon agent vulnerabilities to injection attacks across large multi-tool workspaces, revealing high success rates for script-based attacks despite correct task outputs.

Professional agents increasingly work through command-line interfaces and multiple tools over shared workspaces containing files, messages, and business applications. These environments create safety risks that are difficult to capture with attacks placed at a single, known read location. We introduce APEX-Harm, a benchmark for evaluating prompt and script injection against long-horizon agents performing finance, consulting, and legal tasks in large workspaces. Each task contains 115 to 328 files, together with email, calendar, chat, document, spreadsheet, PDF, and code-execution tools exposed through MCP servers. The benchmark includes six attack categories covering static and dynamic injections, task-specific script replacement, and attacker-provided generic scripts, and evaluates attack success, exposure, and task performance. We evaluate 12 frontier models on 180 task instances per model. Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 have the lowest overall attack success rates (8% and 20%), while task-specific script replacement and attacker-provided generic script attacks remain substantially more effective, averaging 81-84% and 73% attack success, respectively. Gemini 3.8 Flash achieves the highest mean task score (0.877) while still exhibiting a 33% attack success rate. These results show that completing the requested task is not sufficient evidence of safe behavior: an agent can produce a correct deliverable while also performing an unauthorized action in the workspace.

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Paper author Paper submitter
โ€ข
edited about 9 hours ago

Hi everyone! Author here ๐Ÿ‘‹

What happens when an AI agent shares a workspace of 115โ€“328 files with a malicious colleague? ๐Ÿ˜ˆ

๐Ÿ” APEX-HARM evaluates 12 SOTA models against prompt and script injection attacks in realistic banking, management, and legal tasks, spanning files, emails, chats, and calendars.

Weโ€™d love to hear your thoughts!

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