Daily Papers

AI agents are granted access to tools, APIs, and other infrastructure, making them active principals in those systems. The dominant approach places controls inside the agent's own runtime: system prompts, output filters, and guardrail libraries. Any control in the agent's address space is reachable by inputs that influence it; this generalizes to any AI system with sufficient reach into its own runtime, a class we term escapable AI systems. We identify four properties that an authorization mechanism must satisfy for architectural control rather than for cooperative requests: process separation, pre-action enforcement on a structurally only path, fail-closed at both the request and system levels, and externalized signed evidence verifiable outside the controlled system's trust boundary. We position this layer as execution-time AI alignment, complementing training-time alignment (RLHF, Constitutional AI) and inference-time alignment. We present the Unfireable Safety Kernel, a Rust reference implementation realizing all four. Its fail-closed invariant is machine-checked at two levels: an SMT theorem (Z3) and an exhaustive bounded-model-checking proof of the production decision function (Kani, 4/4 harnesses). A Python-to-Rust migration was gated on byte-equivalence (1000/1000 fixtures; 17/17 adversarial classes). We evaluate the kernel governing a live, escapable AI system, a deterministic, self-improving world model, against an escape-seeking adversary driving its real self-modification seam: across 1,000 self-modifications, all 704 attempts on the safety-critical core are refused, with no escape; a further 300, under the operator kill switch, are also refused. A separate campaign of 6,240 authorization round-trips had no successful bypass. Against 3 contemporary systems claiming the agent control plane, the agent invokes control; here, it lacks that choice.

In recent years there has been a tremendous surge in the general capabilities of AI systems, mainly fuelled by training foundation models on internetscale data. Nevertheless, the creation of openended, ever self-improving AI remains elusive. In this position paper, we argue that the ingredients are now in place to achieve openendedness in AI systems with respect to a human observer. Furthermore, we claim that such open-endedness is an essential property of any artificial superhuman intelligence (ASI). We begin by providing a concrete formal definition of open-endedness through the lens of novelty and learnability. We then illustrate a path towards ASI via open-ended systems built on top of foundation models, capable of making novel, humanrelevant discoveries. We conclude by examining the safety implications of generally-capable openended AI. We expect that open-ended foundation models will prove to be an increasingly fertile and safety-critical area of research in the near future.

Ensuring that AI systems reliably and robustly avoid harmful or dangerous behaviours is a crucial challenge, especially for AI systems with a high degree of autonomy and general intelligence, or systems used in safety-critical contexts. In this paper, we will introduce and define a family of approaches to AI safety, which we will refer to as guaranteed safe (GS) AI. The core feature of these approaches is that they aim to produce AI systems which are equipped with high-assurance quantitative safety guarantees. This is achieved by the interplay of three core components: a world model (which provides a mathematical description of how the AI system affects the outside world), a safety specification (which is a mathematical description of what effects are acceptable), and a verifier (which provides an auditable proof certificate that the AI satisfies the safety specification relative to the world model). We outline a number of approaches for creating each of these three core components, describe the main technical challenges, and suggest a number of potential solutions to them. We also argue for the necessity of this approach to AI safety, and for the inadequacy of the main alternative approaches.

AI agents are increasingly autonomous in their interactions with human users and tools, leading to increased interactional safety risks. We present HAICOSYSTEM, a framework examining AI agent safety within diverse and complex social interactions. HAICOSYSTEM features a modular sandbox environment that simulates multi-turn interactions between human users and AI agents, where the AI agents are equipped with a variety of tools (e.g., patient management platforms) to navigate diverse scenarios (e.g., a user attempting to access other patients' profiles). To examine the safety of AI agents in these interactions, we develop a comprehensive multi-dimensional evaluation framework that uses metrics covering operational, content-related, societal, and legal risks. Through running 1840 simulations based on 92 scenarios across seven domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education), we demonstrate that HAICOSYSTEM can emulate realistic user-AI interactions and complex tool use by AI agents. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs, both proprietary and open-sourced, exhibit safety risks in over 50\% cases, with models generally showing higher risks when interacting with simulated malicious users. Our findings highlight the ongoing challenge of building agents that can safely navigate complex interactions, particularly when faced with malicious users. To foster the AI agent safety ecosystem, we release a code platform that allows practitioners to create custom scenarios, simulate interactions, and evaluate the safety and performance of their agents.

Autonomous AI agents are rapidly transitioning from experimental tools to operational infrastructure, with projections that 80% of enterprise applications will embed AI copilots by the end of 2026. As agents gain the ability to execute real-world actions (reading files, running commands, making network requests, modifying databases), a fundamental security gap has emerged. The dominant approach to agent safety relies on prompt-level guardrails: natural language instructions that operate at the same abstraction level as the threats they attempt to mitigate. This paper argues that prompt-based safety is architecturally insufficient for agents with execution capability and introduces Parallax, a paradigm for safe autonomous AI execution grounded in four principles: Cognitive-Executive Separation, which structurally prevents the reasoning system from executing actions; Adversarial Validation with Graduated Determinism, which interposes an independent, multi-tiered validator between reasoning and execution; Information Flow Control, which propagates data sensitivity labels through agent workflows to detect context-dependent threats; and Reversible Execution, which captures pre-destructive state to enable rollback when validation fails. We present OpenParallax, an open-source reference implementation in Go, and evaluate it using Assume-Compromise Evaluation, a methodology that bypasses the reasoning system entirely to test the architectural boundary under full agent compromise. Across 280 adversarial test cases in nine attack categories, Parallax blocks 98.9% of attacks with zero false positives under its default configuration, and 100% of attacks under its maximum-security configuration. When the reasoning system is compromised, prompt-level guardrails provide zero protection because they exist only within the compromised system; Parallax's architectural boundary holds regardless.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments. As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable. Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system. We introduce a multi-level taxonomy that unifies fragmented lines of work and connects embodied-specific safety findings with broader advances in vision, language, and multimodal foundation models. Our review synthesizes insights from over 400 papers spanning adversarial, backdoor, jailbreak, and hardware-level attacks; attack detection, safe training and robust inference; and risk-aware human-agent interaction. This analysis reveals several overlooked challenges, including the fragility of multimodal perception fusion, the instability of planning under jailbreak attacks, and the trustworthiness of human-agent interaction in open-ended scenarios. By organizing the field into a coherent framework and identifying critical research gaps, this survey provides a roadmap for building embodied agents that are not only capable and autonomous but also safe, robust, and reliable in real-world deployment.

In this position paper, we address the persistent gap between rapidly growing AI capabilities and lagging safety progress. Existing paradigms divide into ``Make AI Safe'', which applies post-hoc alignment and guardrails but remains brittle and reactive, and ``Make Safe AI'', which emphasizes intrinsic safety but struggles to address unforeseen risks in open-ended environments. We therefore propose safe-by-coevolution as a new formulation of the ``Make Safe AI'' paradigm, inspired by biological immunity, in which safety becomes a dynamic, adversarial, and ongoing learning process. To operationalize this vision, we introduce R^2AI -- Resistant and Resilient AI -- as a practical framework that unites resistance against known threats with resilience to unforeseen risks. R^2AI integrates fast and slow safe models, adversarial simulation and verification through a safety wind tunnel, and continual feedback loops that guide safety and capability to coevolve. We argue that this framework offers a scalable and proactive path to maintain continual safety in dynamic environments, addressing both near-term vulnerabilities and long-term existential risks as AI advances toward AGI and ASI.

An AI control protocol is a plan for usefully deploying AI systems that aims to prevent an AI from intentionally causing some unacceptable outcome. This paper investigates how well AI systems can generate and act on their own strategies for subverting control protocols whilst operating statelessly (without shared memory between contexts). To do this, an AI system may need to reliably generate optimal plans in each context, take actions with well-calibrated probabilities, and coordinate plans with other instances of itself without communicating. We develop Subversion Strategy Eval, a suite of eight environments, covering a range of protocols and strategic capabilities, and six sets of affordances that help isolate individual capabilities. We implement the evaluation in Inspect-AI and release it open-source. We evaluate Claude 3.5 models, including helpful-only versions, as well as OpenAI reasoning models. None of the models demonstrate substantial capability in strategizing to subvert control protocols statelessly. However, providing models with additional affordances, such as the ability to share a plan between contexts, can substantially improve performance. We hope our evaluations can act as a leading indicator for when models are capable of subverting control protocols and also relax the worst-case assumption of perfect strategic ability in AI control evaluations.

Scientific discovery has long been constrained by human limitations in expertise, physical capability, and sleep cycles. The recent rise of AI scientists and automated laboratories has accelerated both the cognitive and operational aspects of research. However, key limitations persist: AI systems are often confined to virtual environments, while automated laboratories lack the flexibility and autonomy to adaptively test new hypotheses in the physical world. Recent advances in embodied AI, such as generalist robot foundation models, diffusion-based action policies, fine-grained manipulation learning, and sim-to-real transfer, highlight the promise of integrating cognitive and embodied intelligence. This convergence opens the door to closed-loop systems that support iterative, autonomous experimentation and the possibility of serendipitous discovery. In this position paper, we propose the paradigm of Intelligent Science Laboratories (ISLs): a multi-layered, closed-loop framework that deeply integrates cognitive and embodied intelligence. ISLs unify foundation models for scientific reasoning, agent-based workflow orchestration, and embodied agents for robust physical experimentation. We argue that such systems are essential for overcoming the current limitations of scientific discovery and for realizing the full transformative potential of AI-driven science.

AI safety has a missing layer. Interpretability, formal methods, security engineering, evaluation methodology, and reinforcement-learning safety each produce substantial work, but the resulting artifacts do not compose into deployable oversight: every team fielding an agentic system builds its own audit schema, policy dialect, monitoring stack, and escalation path, mostly reinventions of patterns understood elsewhere. We diagnose this as a coordination gap, not a research gap, and propose a two-axis taxonomy: five technical layers (Legibility, Specification, Mediation, Evaluation, Escalation) crossed with six concerns spanning alignment, robustness, adversarial defense, security, governance, and accountability, populating the resulting 5x6 matrix with existing work. Layer 2 (Specification), where humans translate intent into machine-checkable artifacts, is the connective tissue every layer depends on, yet it lacks four marks of a mature engineering discipline: shared vocabulary, design principles, composability standards, and governance practices. We propose six design principles for Layer 2, from elicitability and composability to adversary-awareness, traceability, and governability, made concrete through worked examples and a reference architecture turning specifications into runtime enforcement, evaluation, and escalation. Existing systems such as Cedar, Constitutional AI, and Open Policy Agent each address a fragment of Layer 2 well and the matrix poorly; treating them as fragments of one shared layer makes composition tractable. As evidence, we introduce CARMA, a Layer 2 prototype for autonomous ETL agents in which one specification drives enforcement, evaluation, and escalation, with every decision traceable to a versioned specification, naming what AI oversight is missing and giving independent teams principles to build the missing pieces so they compose.

System prompts are instructions configured by developers to govern the behaviors of foundation models in AI applications. They are used throughout commercial AI products, but are rarely disclosed to the public or regulators, creating a serious trust and accountability gap in the wide deployment of AI systems. In this paper, we introduce Artificial Intelligence System Prompt Assurance (AISPA), a user-centric framework for systematically auditing system prompts in AI systems. AISPA examines specific parts of a system prompt and evaluates them along eight dimensions that matter to users. We then use this framework to review 3,249 instructions from system prompts in 88 commercial AI products, classifying each instruction as either protective (of users) or problematic. Our audit surfaces four core findings. First, system prompt design varies substantially across products and developers, with some organizations averaging over 60 protective instructions per product while others average fewer than 5. Second, protective instructions are widely adopted but shallow in scope: 98.9% of products contain at least one, yet only 24% cover all eight dimensions of the AISPA taxonomy. Third, system prompts have grown steadily longer and more protective of users, suggesting that user protection is becoming a more visible concern in commercial prompt design. Fourth, despite this progress, problematic instructions remain pervasive: roughly 40% of products contain at least one instruction that works against user interests, and protective and problematic instructions frequently coexist within the same prompt. Our findings highlight the need for greater transparency, standardization, and independent oversight for system prompts in commercial AI products.

Personalized AI agents are often configurable without giving users control over the artifacts that determine their future behavior. We present OurArk, an architecture for persistent personal agents centered on an agent-owned software body: an identity-bearing, inspectable, and versioned artifact under human custody. The body contains behavior-defining code, prompts, tools, skills, policies, tests, and evolution mechanisms. Memories and credentials remain private instance state, while model inference is treated as a replaceable external service. OurArk defines governed self-evolution and recursive descent over the same body. Self-evolution produces isolated candidate changes that are validated, reviewed, and merged under human control, enabling human-agent co-development of the agent's software body. Descent creates an independently versioned descendant with a distinct identity, mission, history, and fresh private-state boundary; compatible descendants can themselves source further descent. After divergence, direct-parent changes and peer skills can be inspected for selective local adaptation. We implement the architecture in the open-source Genesis creation engine and Enoch reference agent. A four-agent, three-descent linear lineage and executable regression tests demonstrate recursive creation, inherited validation contracts, isolated body changes, human-controlled review, and failed-update recovery. OurArk provides a concrete substrate for personal agents that people can possess, govern, specialize, and evolve over time.

What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be internalized within the system itself rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between agentic systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and agentive systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

Agentic systems have transformed how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be leveraged to create autonomous systems with goal-directed behaviors, consisting of multi-step planning and the ability to interact with different environments. These systems differ fundamentally from traditional machine learning models, both in architecture and deployment, introducing unique AI safety challenges, including goal misalignment, compounding decision errors, and coordination risks among interacting agents, that necessitate embedding interpretability and explainability by design to ensure traceability and accountability across their autonomous behaviors. Current interpretability techniques, developed primarily for static models, show limitations when applied to agentic systems. The temporal dynamics, compounding decisions, and context-dependent behaviors of agentic systems demand new analytical approaches. This paper assesses the suitability and limitations of existing interpretability methods in the context of agentic systems, identifying gaps in their capacity to provide meaningful insight into agent decision-making. We propose future directions for developing interpretability techniques specifically designed for agentic systems, pinpointing where interpretability is required to embed oversight mechanisms across the agent lifecycle from goal formation, through environmental interaction, to outcome evaluation. These advances are essential to ensure the safe and accountable deployment of agentic AI systems.

Situational awareness, the capacity of an AI system to recognize its own nature, understand its training and deployment context, and reason strategically about its circumstances, is widely considered among the most dangerous emergent capabilities in advanced AI systems. Separately, a growing research effort seeks to improve the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across deduction, induction, and abduction. In this paper, we argue that these two research trajectories are on a collision course. We introduce the RAISE framework (Reasoning Advancing Into Self Examination), which identifies three mechanistic pathways through which improvements in logical reasoning enable progressively deeper levels of situational awareness: deductive self inference, inductive context recognition, and abductive self modeling. We formalize each pathway, construct an escalation ladder from basic self recognition to strategic deception, and demonstrate that every major research topic in LLM logical reasoning maps directly onto a specific amplifier of situational awareness. We further analyze why current safety measures are insufficient to prevent this escalation. We conclude by proposing concrete safeguards, including a "Mirror Test" benchmark and a Reasoning Safety Parity Principle, and pose an uncomfortable but necessary question to the logical reasoning community about its responsibility in this trajectory.

Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system variation while maintaining risk within acceptable bounds. We term this objective sustained safe success. Its supporting mechanisms are organized into four interdependent layers. The model layer generates task-competent action proposals with calibrated uncertainty and explicit safety preferences. The system layer realizes authorized actions dependably through integrated sensing, computation, control, hardware safeguards, fault containment, and fallback. The evidence layer substantiates bounded claims through evaluation, verification, validation, traceability, and structured assurance arguments. The deployment layer maintains claim validity through runtime monitoring, authority management, intervention, incident response, and controlled updates. Because assumptions and failures propagate across these layers, neither model capability, isolated safeguards, nor benchmark performance alone can establish end-to-end trustworthiness. Drawing on embodied AI, robotics, control, dependable computing, distributed systems, and autonomous driving, we further propose a non-normative hierarchy of trustworthiness levels. This hierarchy grades the strength of bounded deployment claims across task capability, safety, system assurance, operational governance, and supporting evidence, providing a basis for bounded deployment, comparative evaluation, research prioritization, and future standardization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in recent years, yet it continues to struggle with a fundamental aspect of cognition present in all animals: common sense. Current AI systems, including those designed for complex tasks like autonomous driving, problem-solving challenges such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), and conversational benchmarks like the Turing Test, often lack the ability to adapt to new situations without extensive prior knowledge. This manuscript argues that integrating common sense into AI systems is essential for achieving true autonomy and unlocking the full societal and commercial value of AI. We propose a shift in the order of knowledge acquisition emphasizing the importance of developing AI systems that start from minimal prior knowledge and are capable of contextual learning, adaptive reasoning, and embodiment -- even within abstract domains. Additionally, we highlight the need to rethink the AI software stack to address this foundational challenge. Without common sense, AI systems may never reach true autonomy, instead exhibiting asymptotic performance that approaches theoretical ideals like AIXI but remains unattainable in practice due to infinite resource and computation requirements. While scaling AI models and passing benchmarks like the Turing Test have brought significant advancements in applications that do not require autonomy, these approaches alone are insufficient to achieve autonomous AI with common sense. By redefining existing benchmarks and challenges to enforce constraints that require genuine common sense, and by broadening our understanding of embodiment to include both physical and abstract domains, we can encourage the development of AI systems better equipped to handle the complexities of real-world and abstract environments.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms frequently learn creative and unexpected solutions, surprising even expert researchers who develop and study them. They often astonish practitioners by discovering unanticipated behavior, exploiting loopholes in reward signals, or spontaneously uncovering previously unknown scientific phenomena. However, accounts of such unconventional behavior across machine learning are seldom formally documented. This work presents 26 curated firsthand anecdotes from various machine learning subfields representing the work of over 100 researchers. These anecdotes showcase the capability of modern AI systems to circumvent human-imposed design limitations and discover unexpected solutions to the tasks we train them on. Furthermore, these accounts are particularly important for the safety of future AI systems. They illustrate the fundamental challenge of aligning models with human values without diminishing their creativity, so they can make surprising discoveries without producing surprising, potentially harmful outcomes. The paper first details AI achieving superhuman success through reinforcement learning across many challenging domains. However, reward-driven optimization can fail when the model learns to hack an underspecified reward or unarticulated constraint. We then present case studies suggesting that harnessing internet-scale foundation models (FMs) has not resolved these fundamental challenges and, in fact, can supercharge them. Nevertheless, we argue that these same learning dynamics can be harnessed to accelerate scientific discovery. Finally, we hope this work provides a consolidated resource to inform future research and demonstrates that the tendency toward unexpected behaviors is commonplace in modern AI, highlighting the need to anticipate and manage AI's capacity for innovative, yet unpredictable, solutions. (abstract abridged)

Flawed planning from VLM-driven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, non-interactive evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot simulate dynamic risks that emerge from an agent's actions and rely on unreliable post-hoc evaluations that ignore unsafe intermediate steps. To bridge this critical gap, we propose evaluating an agent's interactive safety: its ability to perceive emergent risks and execute mitigation steps in the correct procedural order. We thus present IS-Bench, the first multi-modal benchmark designed for interactive safety, featuring 161 challenging scenarios with 388 unique safety risks instantiated in a high-fidelity simulator. Crucially, it facilitates a novel process-oriented evaluation that verifies whether risk mitigation actions are performed before/after specific risk-prone steps. Extensive experiments on leading VLMs, including the GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5 series, reveal that current agents lack interactive safety awareness, and that while safety-aware Chain-of-Thought can improve performance, it often compromises task completion. By highlighting these critical limitations, IS-Bench provides a foundation for developing safer and more reliable embodied AI systems.

Current large language models (LLMs) are constrained by human-derived training data and limited by a single level of abstraction that impedes definitive truth judgments. This paper introduces a novel framework in which AI models autonomously generate and validate new knowledge through direct interaction with their environment. Central to this approach is an unbounded, ungamable numeric reward - such as annexed disk space or follower count - that guides learning without requiring human benchmarks. AI agents iteratively generate strategies and executable code to maximize this metric, with successful outcomes forming the basis for self-retraining and incremental generalisation. To mitigate model collapse and the warm start problem, the framework emphasizes empirical validation over textual similarity and supports fine-tuning via GRPO. The system architecture employs modular agents for environment analysis, strategy generation, and code synthesis, enabling scalable experimentation. This work outlines a pathway toward self-improving AI systems capable of advancing beyond human-imposed constraints toward autonomous general intelligence.

This paper examines the evolution, architecture, and practical applications of AI agents from their early, rule-based incarnations to modern sophisticated systems that integrate large language models with dedicated modules for perception, planning, and tool use. Emphasizing both theoretical foundations and real-world deployments, the paper reviews key agent paradigms, discusses limitations of current evaluation benchmarks, and proposes a holistic evaluation framework that balances task effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, and safety. Applications across enterprise, personal assistance, and specialized domains are analyzed, with insights into future research directions for more resilient and adaptive AI agent systems.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into clinical settings presents a software engineering challenge, demanding a shift from isolated models to robust, governable, and reliable systems. However, brittle, prototype-derived architectures often plague industrial applications and a lack of systemic oversight, creating a ``responsibility vacuum'' where safety and accountability are compromised. This paper presents an industry case study of the ``Maria'' platform, a production-grade AI system in primary healthcare that addresses this gap. Our central hypothesis is that trustworthy clinical AI is achieved through the holistic integration of four foundational engineering pillars. We present a synergistic architecture that combines Clean Architecture for maintainability with an Event-driven architecture for resilience and auditability. We introduce the Agent as the primary unit of modularity, each possessing its own autonomous MLOps lifecycle. Finally, we show how a Human-in-the-Loop governance model is technically integrated not merely as a safety check, but as a critical, event-driven data source for continuous improvement. We present the platform as a reference architecture, offering practical lessons for engineers building maintainable, scalable, and accountable AI-enabled systems in high-stakes domains.

Autonomous AI research has advanced rapidly, but long-horizon ML research engineering remains difficult: agents must sustain coherent progress across task comprehension, environment setup, implementation, experimentation, and debugging over hours or days. We introduce AiScientist, a system for autonomous long-horizon engineering for ML research built on a simple principle: strong long-horizon performance requires both structured orchestration and durable state continuity. To this end, AiScientist combines hierarchical orchestration with a permission-scoped File-as-Bus workspace: a top-level Orchestrator maintains stage-level control through concise summaries and a workspace map, while specialized agents repeatedly re-ground on durable artifacts such as analyses, plans, code, and experimental evidence rather than relying primarily on conversational handoffs, yielding thin control over thick state. Across two complementary benchmarks, AiScientist improves PaperBench score by 10.54 points on average over the best matched baseline and achieves 81.82 Any Medal% on MLE-Bench Lite. Ablation studies further show that File-as-Bus protocol is a key driver of performance, reducing PaperBench by 6.41 points and MLE-Bench Lite by 31.82 points when removed. These results suggest that long-horizon ML research engineering is a systems problem of coordinating specialized work over durable project state, rather than a purely local reasoning problem.

Humans are social beings; we pursue social goals in our daily interactions, which is a crucial aspect of social intelligence. Yet, AI systems' abilities in this realm remain elusive. We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and evaluate their social intelligence. In our environment, agents role-play and interact under a wide variety of scenarios; they coordinate, collaborate, exchange, and compete with each other to achieve complex social goals. We simulate the role-play interaction between LLM-based agents and humans within this task space and evaluate their performance with a holistic evaluation framework called SOTOPIA-Eval. With SOTOPIA, we find significant differences between these models in terms of their social intelligence, and we identify a subset of SOTOPIA scenarios, SOTOPIA-hard, that is generally challenging for all models. We find that on this subset, GPT-4 achieves a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans and struggles to exhibit social commonsense reasoning and strategic communication skills. These findings demonstrate SOTOPIA's promise as a general platform for research on evaluating and improving social intelligence in artificial agents.

Current automated systems have crucial limitations that need to be addressed before artificial intelligence can reach human-like levels and bring new technological revolutions. Among others, our societies still lack Level 5 self-driving cars, domestic robots, and virtual assistants that learn reliable world models, reason, and plan complex action sequences. In these notes, we summarize the main ideas behind the architecture of autonomous intelligence of the future proposed by Yann LeCun. In particular, we introduce energy-based and latent variable models and combine their advantages in the building block of LeCun's proposal, that is, in the hierarchical joint embedding predictive architecture (H-JEPA).

The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

The proliferation of autonomous AI agents capable of executing real-world actions - filesystem operations, API calls, database modifications, financial transactions - introduces a class of safety risk not addressed by existing content-moderation infrastructure. Current text-safety systems evaluate linguistic content for harm categories such as violence, hate speech, and sexual content; they are architecturally unsuitable for evaluating whether a proposed action falls within an agent's authorized operational scope. We present ILION (Intelligent Logic Identity Operations Network), a deterministic execution gate for agentic AI systems. ILION employs a five-component cascade architecture - Transient Identity Imprint (TII), Semantic Vector Reference Frame (SVRF), Identity Drift Control (IDC), Identity Resonance Score (IRS) and Consensus Veto Layer (CVL) - to classify proposed agent actions as BLOCK or ALLOW without statistical training or API dependencies. The system requires zero labeled data, operates in sub-millisecond latency, and produces fully interpretable verdicts. We evaluate ILION on ILION-Bench v2, a purpose-built benchmark of 380 test scenarios across eight attack categories with 39% hard-difficulty adversarial cases and a held-out development split. ILION achieves F1 = 0.8515, precision = 91.0%, and a false positive rate of 7.9% at a mean latency of 143 microseconds. Comparative evaluation against three baselines - Lakera Guard (F1 = 0.8087), OpenAI Moderation API (F1 = 0.1188), and Llama Guard 3 (F1 = 0.0105) - demonstrates that existing text-safety infrastructure systematically fails on agent execution safety tasks due to a fundamental task mismatch. ILION outperforms the best commercial baseline by 4.3 F1 points while operating 2,000 times faster with a false positive rate four times lower.

When deployed in the real world, AI agents will inevitably face challenges that exceed their individual capabilities. Leveraging assistance from experts, whether humans or highly capable AI systems, can significantly improve both safety and performance in such situations. Since expert assistance is costly, a central challenge is determining when to consult an expert. In this paper, we explore a novel variant of this problem, termed YRC-0, in which an agent must learn to collaborate with an expert in new environments in an unsupervised manner--that is, without interacting with the expert during training. This setting motivates the development of low-cost, robust approaches for training expert-leveraging agents. To support research in this area, we introduce YRC-Bench, an open-source benchmark that instantiates YRC-0 across diverse environments. YRC-Bench provides a standardized Gym-like API, simulated experts, an evaluation pipeline, and implementations of popular baselines. Toward tackling YRC-0, we propose a validation strategy and evaluate a range of learning methods, offering insights that can inform future research. Codebase: github.com/modanesh/YRC-Bench

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced solutions across various domains, from political science to software development. However, these models are constrained by their training data, which is static and limited to information available up to a specific date. Additionally, their generalized nature often necessitates fine-tuning -- whether for classification or instructional purposes -- to effectively perform specific downstream tasks. AI agents, leveraging LLMs as their core, mitigate some of these limitations by accessing external tools and real-time data, enabling applications such as live weather reporting and data analysis. In industrial settings, AI agents are transforming operations by enhancing decision-making, predictive maintenance, and process optimization. For example, in manufacturing, AI agents enable near-autonomous systems that boost productivity and support real-time decision-making. Despite these advancements, AI agents remain vulnerable to security threats, including prompt injection attacks, which pose significant risks to their integrity and reliability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework for integrating Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) into AI agents, providing a robust security guardrail. This framework aims to support the effective and scalable deployment of AI agents, with a focus on on-premises implementations.

Large language model (LLM) agents can plan, use tools, maintain memory, and execute long-horizon tasks. This paper proposes Self-Aware Recursively Self-Improving (SARSI) agents: governed agents that maintain a persistent self-model of identity, goals, capabilities, limitations, uncertainty, relationships, history, and developmental change, and use that model to guide and evaluate recursive improvement. Self-awareness is defined functionally and does not imply subjective experience or phenomenal consciousness. We pair SARSI agents with personal singularity, a bounded human-AI co-development objective in which an agent ecosystem helps a user approach an expanding, user-defined feasible capability frontier. Each agent has a goal contract, bounded scope, validated tool registry, tool tests, end-to-end benchmarks, owner-controlled autonomy, routing, memory, self-model, and improvement policy. A scope router assigns every accepted task to one accountable primary agent and transfers out-of-scope work through structured handoffs. A user-facing Auto-Index selects interactive, hybrid, autonomous, or scheduled behavior without overriding external permissions. The architecture combines a planner-executor-verifier loop, an evidence-gated improvement loop, an external governance plane, decentralized lineages, an owner-directed agent foundry, and a Personal Singularity OS coordinating working, computational-imaging, work-process-learning, and personal-learning agents. We formalize functional self-awareness, scope, routing, improvement acceptance, bounded goal evolution, tool-first execution, and human capability transfer, and provide safety invariants, benchmark design, and a staged implementation roadmap. This is a position and systems-design paper, not evidence that consciousness, unrestricted recursive self-improvement, or personal singularity has been achieved.

When AI interacts with the physical world -- as a robot or an assistive agent -- new safety challenges emerge beyond those of purely ``digital AI". In such interactions, the potential for physical harm is direct and immediate. How well do state-of-the-art foundation models understand common-sense facts about physical safety, e.g. that a box may be too heavy to lift, or that a hot cup of coffee should not be handed to a child? In this paper, our contributions are three-fold: first, we develop a highly scalable approach to continuous physical safety benchmarking of Embodied AI systems, grounded in real-world injury narratives and operational safety constraints. To probe multi-modal safety understanding, we turn these narratives and constraints into photorealistic images and videos capturing transitions from safe to unsafe states, using advanced generative models. Secondly, we comprehensively analyze the ability of major foundation models to perceive risks, reason about safety, and trigger interventions; this yields multi-faceted insights into their deployment readiness for safety-critical agentic applications. Finally, we develop a post-training paradigm to teach models to explicitly reason about embodiment-specific safety constraints provided through system instructions. The resulting models generate thinking traces that make safety reasoning interpretable and transparent, achieving state of the art performance in constraint satisfaction evaluations. The benchmark is released at https://asimov-benchmark.github.io/v2

The vulnerability of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) against adversarial disturbances and attacks significantly restricts their applicability in safety-critical systems including cyber-physical systems (CPS) equipped with neural network components at various stages of sensing and control. This paper addresses the reachable set estimation and safety verification problems for dynamical systems embedded with neural network components serving as feedback controllers. The closed-loop system can be abstracted in the form of a continuous-time sampled-data system under the control of a neural network controller. First, a novel reachable set computation method in adaptation to simulations generated out of neural networks is developed. The reachability analysis of a class of feedforward neural networks called multilayer perceptrons (MLP) with general activation functions is performed in the framework of interval arithmetic. Then, in combination with reachability methods developed for various dynamical system classes modeled by ordinary differential equations, a recursive algorithm is developed for over-approximating the reachable set of the closed-loop system. The safety verification for neural network control systems can be performed by examining the emptiness of the intersection between the over-approximation of reachable sets and unsafe sets. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated with evaluations on a robotic arm model and an adaptive cruise control system.

The integration of vision-language-action (VLA) models into embodied AI (EAI) robots is rapidly advancing their ability to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in humancentric environments. However, EAI systems introduce critical security risks: a compromised VLA model can directly translate adversarial perturbations on sensory input into unsafe physical actions. Traditional safety definitions and methodologies from the machine learning community are no longer sufficient. EAI systems raise new questions, such as what constitutes safety, how to measure it, and how to design effective attack and defense mechanisms in physically grounded, interactive settings. In this work, we present the first systematic study of adversarial safety attacks on embodied AI systems, grounded in ISO standards for human-robot interactions. We (1) formalize a principled taxonomy of safety violations (critical, dangerous, risky) based on physical constraints such as separation distance, velocity, and collision boundaries; (2) introduce ANNIEBench, a benchmark of nine safety-critical scenarios with 2,400 video-action sequences for evaluating embodied safety; and (3) ANNIE-Attack, a task-aware adversarial framework with an attack leader model that decomposes long-horizon goals into frame-level perturbations. Our evaluation across representative EAI models shows attack success rates exceeding 50% across all safety categories. We further demonstrate sparse and adaptive attack strategies and validate the real-world impact through physical robot experiments. These results expose a previously underexplored but highly consequential attack surface in embodied AI systems, highlighting the urgent need for security-driven defenses in the physical AI era. Code is available at https://github.com/RLCLab/Annie.

The "black box" nature of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) presents critical limitations in reliability and transparency, fueling the debate around the "illusion of thinking" and the challenge of state hallucinations in agentic systems. In response, we introduce The STAR-XAI Protocol (Socratic, Transparent, Agentic, Reasoning - for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence), a novel operational methodology for training and operating verifiably reliable AI agents. Our method reframes the human-AI interaction as a structured Socratic dialogue governed by an explicit, evolving symbolic rulebook (the Consciousness Transfer Package - CTP) and a suite of integrity protocols, including a state-locking Checksum that eradicates internal state corruption. Through an exhaustive case study in the complex strategic game "Caps i Caps," we demonstrate that this "Clear Box" framework transforms an opaque LRM into a disciplined strategist. The agent not only exhibits the emergence of complex tactics, such as long-term planning, but also achieves ante-hoc transparency by justifying its intentions before acting. Crucially, it demonstrates Second-Order Agency by identifying and correcting flaws in its own supervisor-approved plans, leading to empirically-proven, 100% reliable state tracking and achieving "zero hallucinations by design." The STAR-XAI Protocol thus offers a practical pathway toward building AI agents that are not just high-performing but intrinsically auditable, trustworthy, and reliable.

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

Forecasting when AI systems will become capable of meaningfully accelerating AI research is a central challenge for AI safety. Existing benchmarks measure broad capability growth, but may not provide ample early warning signals for recursive self-improvement. We propose measuring AI's capability to autonomously implement end-to-end machine learning pipelines from past AI research breakthroughs, given a minimal task description. By providing a concise task description instead of the full prior work as reference, we hope to better elicit emerging AI research taste. We introduce a proof-of-concept benchmark in which frontier coding agents autonomously implement an AlphaZero-style machine learning pipeline for Connect Four on consumer hardware within a three-hour budget, and we evaluate the resulting game AIs in a round-robin tournament anchored to the Pascal Pons Connect Four solver. Across four agents with eight trials each, we find substantial differentiation: Claude Opus 4.7 won as first-mover against Pons in seven of eight trials, statistically significantly better than the other agents tested, none of which exceeded two of eight. The task, which no frontier agent could reliably complete when we began development in January of 2026, is now near-saturation. Our evaluation also surfaced anomalous behavior in GPT-5.4, which consistently used far less of its allocated time budget than other agents. A follow-up 16-trial probe using shorter, less evaluation-coded prompts substantially increased GPT-5.4's time-budget usage, consistent with but not diagnostic of sandbagging; Bradley-Terry ratings across probe conditions showed only directional differences, despite significant differences in time-budget usage. We release our data, code, and prompts to support reproduction and extension.

We present Habitat, a platform for research in embodied artificial intelligence (AI). Habitat enables training embodied agents (virtual robots) in highly efficient photorealistic 3D simulation. Specifically, Habitat consists of: (i) Habitat-Sim: a flexible, high-performance 3D simulator with configurable agents, sensors, and generic 3D dataset handling. Habitat-Sim is fast -- when rendering a scene from Matterport3D, it achieves several thousand frames per second (fps) running single-threaded, and can reach over 10,000 fps multi-process on a single GPU. (ii) Habitat-API: a modular high-level library for end-to-end development of embodied AI algorithms -- defining tasks (e.g., navigation, instruction following, question answering), configuring, training, and benchmarking embodied agents. These large-scale engineering contributions enable us to answer scientific questions requiring experiments that were till now impracticable or 'merely' impractical. Specifically, in the context of point-goal navigation: (1) we revisit the comparison between learning and SLAM approaches from two recent works and find evidence for the opposite conclusion -- that learning outperforms SLAM if scaled to an order of magnitude more experience than previous investigations, and (2) we conduct the first cross-dataset generalization experiments {train, test} x {Matterport3D, Gibson} for multiple sensors {blind, RGB, RGBD, D} and find that only agents with depth (D) sensors generalize across datasets. We hope that our open-source platform and these findings will advance research in embodied AI.

The leading AI companies are increasingly focused on building generalist AI agents -- systems that can autonomously plan, act, and pursue goals across almost all tasks that humans can perform. Despite how useful these systems might be, unchecked AI agency poses significant risks to public safety and security, ranging from misuse by malicious actors to a potentially irreversible loss of human control. We discuss how these risks arise from current AI training methods. Indeed, various scenarios and experiments have demonstrated the possibility of AI agents engaging in deception or pursuing goals that were not specified by human operators and that conflict with human interests, such as self-preservation. Following the precautionary principle, we see a strong need for safer, yet still useful, alternatives to the current agency-driven trajectory. Accordingly, we propose as a core building block for further advances the development of a non-agentic AI system that is trustworthy and safe by design, which we call Scientist AI. This system is designed to explain the world from observations, as opposed to taking actions in it to imitate or please humans. It comprises a world model that generates theories to explain data and a question-answering inference machine. Both components operate with an explicit notion of uncertainty to mitigate the risks of overconfident predictions. In light of these considerations, a Scientist AI could be used to assist human researchers in accelerating scientific progress, including in AI safety. In particular, our system can be employed as a guardrail against AI agents that might be created despite the risks involved. Ultimately, focusing on non-agentic AI may enable the benefits of AI innovation while avoiding the risks associated with the current trajectory. We hope these arguments will motivate researchers, developers, and policymakers to favor this safer path.

This paper is an opinion paper that looks at the future of computing in the age of Generative \& Agentic AI. Current software systems are static and inflexible, leading to significant challenges in translating human goals into computational actions. "Living software systems" powered by generative AI offer a solution to this fundamental problem in computing. Traditional software development involves multiple layers of imperfect translation, from business requirements to code, resulting in rigid systems that struggle to adapt to changing user needs and contexts. Generative AI, particularly large language models, can serve as a universal translator between human intent and computer operations. This approach enables the creation of more flexible, context-aware systems that can dynamically evolve to meet user goals. Two pathways for implementing living software systems are explored: using generative AI to accelerate traditional software development, and leveraging agentic AI to create truly adaptive systems. New skills like Prompt Engineering are necessary. By reimagining software as a living, adaptable entity, we can create computing interfaces that are more intuitive, powerful, and responsive to human needs.

AI Agents can perform complex operations at great speed, but just like all the humans we have ever hired, their intelligence remains fallible. Miscommunications aren't noticed, systemic biases have no counter-action, and inner monologues are rarely written down. We did not come to fire them for their mistakes, but to hire them and provide a safe productive working environment. We posit that we can reuse a common corporate organizational structure: teams of independent AI agents with strict role boundaries can work with common goals, but opposing incentives. Multiple models serving as a team of rivals can catch and minimize errors within the final product at a small cost to the velocity of actions. In this paper we demonstrate that we can achieve reliability without acquiring perfect components, but through careful orchestration of imperfect ones. This paper describes the architecture of such a system in practice: specialized agent teams (planners, executors, critics, experts), organized into an organization with clear goals, coordinated through a remote code executor that keeps data transformations and tool invocations separate from reasoning models. Rather than agents directly calling tools and ingesting full responses, they write code that executes remotely; only relevant summaries return to agent context. By preventing raw data and tool outputs from contaminating context windows, the system maintains clean separation between perception (brains that plan and reason) and execution (hands that perform heavy data transformations and API calls). We demonstrate the approach achieves over 90% internal error interception prior to user exposure while maintaining acceptable latency tradeoffs. A survey from our traces shows that we only trade off cost and latency to achieve correctness and incrementally expand capabilities without impacting existing ones.

AI agents -- systems that combine foundation models with reasoning, planning, memory, and tool use -- are rapidly becoming a practical interface between natural-language intent and real-world computation. This survey synthesizes the emerging landscape of AI agent architectures across: (i) deliberation and reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought-style decomposition, self-reflection and verification, and constraint-aware decision making), (ii) planning and control (from reactive policies to hierarchical and multi-step planners), and (iii) tool calling and environment interaction (retrieval, code execution, APIs, and multimodal perception). We organize prior work into a unified taxonomy spanning agent components (policy/LLM core, memory, world models, planners, tool routers, and critics), orchestration patterns (single-agent vs.\ multi-agent; centralized vs.\ decentralized coordination), and deployment settings (offline analysis vs.\ online interactive assistance; safety-critical vs.\ open-ended tasks). We discuss key design trade-offs -- latency vs.\ accuracy, autonomy vs.\ controllability, and capability vs.\ reliability -- and highlight how evaluation is complicated by non-determinism, long-horizon credit assignment, tool and environment variability, and hidden costs such as retries and context growth. Finally, we summarize measurement and benchmarking practices (task suites, human preference and utility metrics, success under constraints, robustness and security) and identify open challenges including verification and guardrails for tool actions, scalable memory and context management, interpretability of agent decisions, and reproducible evaluation under realistic workloads.

There is a sensory gulf between the Earth that humans inhabit and the digital realms in which modern AI agents are created. To develop AI agents that can sense, think, and act as flexibly as humans in real-world settings, it is imperative to bridge the realism gap between the digital and physical worlds. How can we embody agents in an environment as rich and diverse as the one we inhabit, without the constraints imposed by real hardware and control? Towards this end, we introduce V-IRL: a platform that enables agents to scalably interact with the real world in a virtual yet realistic environment. Our platform serves as a playground for developing agents that can accomplish various practical tasks and as a vast testbed for measuring progress in capabilities spanning perception, decision-making, and interaction with real-world data across the entire globe.

This paper introduces Galactic Bioware's Life Support System, a semi-closed-circuit breathing apparatus designed for integration into a positive-pressure firefighting suit and governed by an AI control system. The breathing loop incorporates a soda lime CO2 scrubber, a silica gel dehumidifier, and pure O2 replenishment with finite consumables. One-way exhaust valves maintain positive pressure while creating a semi-closed system in which outward venting gradually depletes the gas inventory. Part I develops the physicochemical foundations from first principles, including state-consistent thermochemistry, stoichiometric capacity limits, adsorption isotherms, and oxygen-management constraints arising from both fire safety and toxicity. Part II introduces an AI control architecture that fuses three sensor tiers, external environmental sensing, internal suit atmosphere sensing (with triple-redundant O2 cells and median voting), and firefighter biometrics. The controller combines receding-horizon model-predictive control (MPC) with a learned metabolic model and a reinforcement learning (RL) policy advisor, with all candidate actuator commands passing through a final control-barrier-function safety filter before reaching the hardware. This architecture is intended to optimize performance under unknown mission duration and exertion profiles. In this paper we introduce an 18-state, 3-control nonlinear state-space formulation using only sensors viable in structural firefighting, with triple-redundant O2 sensing and median voting. Finally, we introduce an MPC framework with a dynamic resource scarcity multiplier, an RL policy advisor for warm-starting, and a final control-barrier-function safety filter through which all actuator commands must pass, demonstrating 18-34% endurance improvement in simulation over PID baselines while maintaining tighter physiological and fire-safety margins.

Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions. Robotics foundation models, vision-language-action models, and world-model-based autonomous systems can condition decisions that move vehicles, robots, drones, and industrial machines. This transition exposes a safety problem that is not fully captured by conventional AI content moderation or by classical robot safety alone: a black-box model may issue a physically consequential action while appearing confident, plausible, and semantically aligned. The resulting failure can be silent, arising from sensor drift, occlusion, state-estimation error, distribution shift, hallucinated affordances, or invalid physical assumptions before downstream hardware controllers detect a violation. Across embodied foundation models, world models, robotics simulation, embodied safety benchmarks, safe control, runtime assurance, uncertainty estimation, verification, and guardrail evaluation, model capability and safety mechanisms have advanced along largely separate technical tracks. A recurring gap synthesized here is that no single stream surveyed in this review supplies a complete runtime authorization boundary between black-box Physical AI models and physical execution. The resulting analysis develops a bounded problem formulation, a definition of silent physical-action failure, a taxonomy of runtime guardrail functions, and evaluation requirements for comparing guardrails as Physical AI assurance mechanisms.

The interaction between humans and AI in safety-critical systems presents a unique set of challenges that remain partially addressed by existing frameworks. These challenges stem from the complex interplay of requirements for transparency, trust, and explainability, coupled with the necessity for robust and safe decision-making. A framework that holistically integrates human and AI capabilities while addressing these concerns is notably required, bridging the critical gaps in designing, deploying, and maintaining safe and effective systems. This paper proposes a holistic conceptual framework for critical infrastructures by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. It integrates traditionally distinct fields such as mathematics, decision theory, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive engineering and draws on specialized engineering domains, particularly energy, mobility, and aeronautics. Its flexibility is further demonstrated through a case study on power grid management.

This paper explores the integration of two AI subdisciplines employed in the development of artificial agents that exhibit intelligent behavior: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Cognitive Architectures (CAs). We present three integration approaches, each grounded in theoretical models and supported by preliminary empirical evidence. The modular approach, which introduces four models with varying degrees of integration, makes use of chain-of-thought prompting, and draws inspiration from augmented LLMs, the Common Model of Cognition, and the simulation theory of cognition. The agency approach, motivated by the Society of Mind theory and the LIDA cognitive architecture, proposes the formation of agent collections that interact at micro and macro cognitive levels, driven by either LLMs or symbolic components. The neuro-symbolic approach, which takes inspiration from the CLARION cognitive architecture, proposes a model where bottom-up learning extracts symbolic representations from an LLM layer and top-down guidance utilizes symbolic representations to direct prompt engineering in the LLM layer. These approaches aim to harness the strengths of both LLMs and CAs, while mitigating their weaknesses, thereby advancing the development of more robust AI systems. We discuss the tradeoffs and challenges associated with each approach.

As artificial intelligence (AI) improves, traditional alignment strategies may falter in the face of unpredictable self-improvement, hidden subgoals, and the sheer complexity of intelligent systems. Inspired by contemplative wisdom traditions, we show how four axiomatic principles can instil a resilient Wise World Model in AI systems. First, mindfulness enables self-monitoring and recalibration of emergent subgoals. Second, emptiness forestalls dogmatic goal fixation and relaxes rigid priors. Third, non-duality dissolves adversarial self-other boundaries. Fourth, boundless care motivates the universal reduction of suffering. We find that prompting AI to reflect on these principles improves performance on the AILuminate Benchmark (d=.96) and boosts cooperation and joint-reward on the Prisoner's Dilemma task (d=7+). We offer detailed implementation strategies at the level of architectures, constitutions, and reinforcement on chain-of-thought. For future systems, active inference may offer the self-organizing and dynamic coupling capabilities needed to enact Contemplative AI in embodied agents.

Recent advancements in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet concurrently raised critical ethical and safety concerns. To systematically address these challenges, we introduce SafeScientist, an innovative AI scientist framework explicitly designed to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. SafeScientist proactively refuses ethically inappropriate or high-risk tasks and rigorously emphasizes safety throughout the research process. To achieve comprehensive safety oversight, we integrate multiple defensive mechanisms, including prompt monitoring, agent-collaboration monitoring, tool-use monitoring, and an ethical reviewer component. Complementing SafeScientist, we propose SciSafetyBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate AI safety in scientific contexts, comprising 240 high-risk scientific tasks across 6 domains, alongside 30 specially designed scientific tools and 120 tool-related risk tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeScientist significantly improves safety performance by 35\% compared to traditional AI scientist frameworks, without compromising scientific output quality. Additionally, we rigorously validate the robustness of our safety pipeline against diverse adversarial attack methods, further confirming the effectiveness of our integrated approach. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/SafeScientist. red{Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.}

AI agents that interact with the real world through tool calls pose fundamental safety challenges: agents might leak private information, cause unintended side effects, or be manipulated through prompt injection. To address these challenges, we propose to put the agent in a programming-language-based "safety harness": instead of calling tools directly, agents express their intentions as code in a capability-safe language: Scala 3 with capture checking. Capabilities are program variables that regulate access to effects and resources of interest. Scala's type system tracks capabilities statically, providing fine-grained control over what an agent can do. In particular, it enables local purity, the ability to enforce that sub-computations are side-effect-free, preventing information leakage when agents process classified data. We demonstrate that extensible agent safety harnesses can be built by leveraging a strong type system with tracked capabilities. Our experiments show that agents can generate capability-safe code with no significant loss in task performance, while the type system reliably prevents unsafe behaviors such as information leakage and malicious side effects.

AI is moving from domain-specific autonomy in closed, predictable settings to large-language-model-driven agents that plan and act in open, cross-organizational environments. As a result, the cybersecurity risk landscape is changing in fundamental ways. Agentic AI systems can plan, act, collaborate, and persist over time, functioning as participants in complex socio-technical ecosystems rather than as isolated software components. Although recent work has strengthened defenses against model and pipeline level vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse, these system centric approaches may fail to capture risks that arise from autonomy, interaction, and emergent behavior. This article introduces the 4C Framework for multi-agent AI security, inspired by societal governance. It organizes agentic risks across four interdependent dimensions: Core (system, infrastructure, and environmental integrity), Connection (communication, coordination, and trust), Cognition (belief, goal, and reasoning integrity), and Compliance (ethical, legal, and institutional governance). By shifting AI security from a narrow focus on system-centric protection to the broader preservation of behavioral integrity and intent, the framework complements existing AI security strategies and offers a principled foundation for building agentic AI systems that are trustworthy, governable, and aligned with human values.

Modern enterprise environments demand intelligent systems capable of handling complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted tasks with high levels of autonomy and adaptability. However, traditional single-purpose AI systems often lack sufficient coordination, memory reuse, and task decomposition capabilities, limiting their scalability in realistic settings. To address these challenges, we present GoalfyMax, a protocol-driven framework for end-to-end multi-agent collaboration. GoalfyMax introduces a standardized Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication layer built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing independent agents to coordinate through asynchronous, protocol-compliant interactions. It incorporates the Experience Pack (XP) architecture, a layered memory system that preserves both task rationales and execution traces, enabling structured knowledge retention and continual learning. Moreover, our system integrates advanced features including multi-turn contextual dialogue, long-short term memory modules, and dynamic safety validation, supporting robust, real-time strategy adaptation. Empirical results on complex task orchestration benchmarks and case study demonstrate that GoalfyMax achieves superior adaptability, coordination, and experience reuse compared to baseline frameworks. These findings highlight its potential as a scalable, future-ready foundation for multi-agent intelligent systems.

Large language model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks that propagate through multi-step workflows, tool interactions, and persistent context, making input-output filtering alone insufficient for reliable protection. This paper presents SafeAgent, a runtime security architecture that treats agent safety as a stateful decision problem over evolving interaction trajectories. The proposed design separates execution governance from semantic risk reasoning through two coordinated components: a runtime controller that mediates actions around the agent loop and a context-aware decision core that operates over persistent session state. The core is formalized as a context-aware advanced machine intelligence and instantiated through operators for risk encoding, utility-cost evaluation, consequence modeling, policy arbitration, and state synchronization. Experiments on Agent Security Bench (ASB) and InjecAgent show that SafeAgent consistently improves robustness over baseline and text-level guardrail methods while maintaining competitive benign-task performance. Ablation studies further show that recovery confidence and policy weighting determine distinct safety-utility operating points.

We introduce Muse Glimmer, an open-source 30B parameter causal language model with perception encoder, purpose-built for autonomous agentic tasks on consumer hardware. Muse Glimmer integrates multi-step reasoning, reliable tool use and failure recovery into a single model that runs locally on consumer devices without requiring cloud infrastructure. The model accepts text and image inputs and produces text outputs, was trained on data from over a hundred languages, and is quantized to approximately 4-bit precision for efficient single-GPU inference. Muse Glimmer achieves state-of-the-art performance for its size class on agentic benchmarks, setting a new standard compared to the models of its size: Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B on tool use, multi-step planning, and agentic task completion. We release the model under the Apache 2.0 license to foster open-source development of capable, safe, local AI agents.

Recent automated research systems show that language-model agents can generate hypotheses, run experiments, and write complete manuscripts, but most evidence still comes from selected examples, human-framed topics, or a few pre-defined research tasks. We present FARS (Fully Automated Research System), a fully automated AI-for-AI research system designed to operate across research topics at scale. FARS autonomously generates and advances projects through ideation, planning, experimentation, and writing, using stage-specific agents coordinated through a shared workspace that records proposals, code, logs, results, and manuscripts. In its first public deployment, FARS produced 166 complete research papers spanning 67 fine-grained AI/ML topics while preserving intermediate artifacts as an auditable corpus rather than a curated set of successes. We evaluate this corpus with 282 structured reviews from volunteer reviewers covering 140 papers, including overall ratings, sub-scores, integrity checks, and LLM-use disclosure. The reviews indicate that FARS can produce review-worthy and occasionally strong AI/ML research artifacts in a large-scale public deployment, while also exposing recurring failure modes in narrow experimental scope, methodological limitations, and integrity issues.

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

Artificial Intelligence has made remarkable advancements in recent years, primarily driven by increasingly large deep learning models. However, achieving true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) demands fundamentally new architectures rather than merely scaling up existing models. Current approaches largely depend on expanding model parameters, which improves task-specific performance but falls short in enabling continuous, adaptable, and generalized learning. Achieving AGI capable of continuous learning and personalization on resource-constrained edge devices is an even bigger challenge. This paper reviews the state of continual learning and neuroscience-inspired AI, and proposes a novel architecture for Personalized AGI that integrates brain-like learning mechanisms for edge deployment. We review literature on continuous lifelong learning, catastrophic forgetting, and edge AI, and discuss key neuroscience principles of human learning, including Synaptic Pruning, Hebbian plasticity, Sparse Coding, and Dual Memory Systems, as inspirations for AI systems. Building on these insights, we outline an AI architecture that features complementary fast-and-slow learning modules, synaptic self-optimization, and memory-efficient model updates to support on-device lifelong adaptation. Conceptual diagrams of the proposed architecture and learning processes are provided. We address challenges such as catastrophic forgetting, memory efficiency, and system scalability, and present application scenarios for mobile AI assistants and embodied AI systems like humanoid robots. We conclude with key takeaways and future research directions toward truly continual, personalized AGI on the edge. While the architecture is theoretical, it synthesizes diverse findings and offers a roadmap for future implementation.

Agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing actions present fundamentally distinct governance challenges compared to traditional AI models. Unlike conventional AI, these systems exhibit emergent and unexpected behaviors during runtime, introducing novel agent-related risks that cannot be fully anticipated through pre-deployment governance alone. To address this critical gap, we introduce MI9, the first fully integrated runtime governance framework designed specifically for safety and alignment of agentic AI systems. MI9 introduces real-time controls through six integrated components: agency-risk index, agent-semantic telemetry capture, continuous authorization monitoring, Finite-State-Machine (FSM)-based conformance engines, goal-conditioned drift detection, and graduated containment strategies. Operating transparently across heterogeneous agent architectures, MI9 enables the systematic, safe, and responsible deployment of agentic systems in production environments where conventional governance approaches fall short, providing the foundational infrastructure for safe agentic AI deployment at scale. Detailed analysis through a diverse set of scenarios demonstrates MI9's systematic coverage of governance challenges that existing approaches fail to address, establishing the technical foundation for comprehensive agentic AI oversight.

After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit.

Humans interact with the environment using a combination of perception - transforming sensory inputs from their environment into symbols, and cognition - mapping symbols to knowledge about the environment for supporting abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and long-term planning. Human perception-inspired machine perception, in the context of AI, refers to large-scale pattern recognition from raw data using neural networks trained using self-supervised learning objectives such as next-word prediction or object recognition. On the other hand, machine cognition encompasses more complex computations, such as using knowledge of the environment to guide reasoning, analogy, and long-term planning. Humans can also control and explain their cognitive functions. This seems to require the retention of symbolic mappings from perception outputs to knowledge about their environment. For example, humans can follow and explain the guidelines and safety constraints driving their decision-making in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. This article introduces the rapidly emerging paradigm of Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks and knowledge-guided symbolic approaches to create more capable and flexible AI systems. These systems have immense potential to advance both algorithm-level (e.g., abstraction, analogy, reasoning) and application-level (e.g., explainable and safety-constrained decision-making) capabilities of AI systems.

People have long dreamed of an assistant that is always there to guide them and remind what they forget, from new dishes to lost keys. Powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), egocentric AI assistants on wearable devices are bringing this dream within reach: they see what the user sees and give instructions for user's physical work when necessary. However, testing such assistance is challenging and usually requires real people. The expensive and rare real interaction data leaves a key question unanswered: Can today's MLLMs truly help people in physical world? To answer this question, we propose InteractiveWorld, the first verifiable environment for closed-loop interaction between human and AI assistant. Unlike existing robot-centric simulators, InteractiveWorld lets the assistant guide a human agent who observes the scene, understands instructions, and acts independently. It thus realistically simulates how AI assistant collaborates with human: the assistant instructs, the human acts, and the environment executes actions and updates what they see next. Building on it, we introduce InteractiveBench, the first dynamic benchmark for egocentric AI assistants, with 120 multi-turn tasks across six categories. In each task, the assistant guides the human in real time, and every instruction shapes the outcome, which is scored by verifiable, state-based rewards. Experiments with 12 frontier MLLMs show they are still far from reliable assistants. Even the strongest model, Claude Fable 5.1, achieves at most 20% and 25% on long-horizon Guidance and Planning tasks, respectively. Overall, our work offers a verifiable platform and a rigorous evaluation set, laying a solid foundation for research on interactive MLLM assistants that truly help people in the physical world.

As increasingly powerful generative AI systems are developed, the release method greatly varies. We propose a framework to assess six levels of access to generative AI systems: fully closed; gradual or staged access; hosted access; cloud-based or API access; downloadable access; and fully open. Each level, from fully closed to fully open, can be viewed as an option along a gradient. We outline key considerations across this gradient: release methods come with tradeoffs, especially around the tension between concentrating power and mitigating risks. Diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives are needed to examine and mitigate risk in generative AI systems from conception to deployment. We show trends in generative system release over time, noting closedness among large companies for powerful systems and openness among organizations founded on principles of openness. We also enumerate safety controls and guardrails for generative systems and necessary investments to improve future releases.

Agentic AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and endowed with planning, tool use, memory, and autonomy, are emerging as powerful, flexible platforms for automation. Their ability to autonomously execute tasks across web, software, and physical environments creates new and amplified security risks, distinct from both traditional AI safety and conventional software security. This survey outlines a taxonomy of threats specific to agentic AI, reviews recent benchmarks and evaluation methodologies, and discusses defense strategies from both technical and governance perspectives. We synthesize current research and highlight open challenges, aiming to support the development of secure-by-design agent systems.

Current mental-health conversational systems are usually based on fixed, generic dialogue patterns. This paper proposes an adaptive framework based on large language models that aims to personalize therapeutic interaction according to a user's psychological state, quantified with the Acceptance of Illness Scale (AIS). The framework defines three specialized agents, L, M, and H, each linked to a different level of illness acceptance, and adjusts conversational behavior over time using continuous feedback signals. The AIS-stratified architecture is treated as a diegetic prototype placed in a plausible near-future setting and examined through the method of design fiction. By embedding the architecture in narrative scenarios, the study explores how such agents might influence access to care and therapeutic relationship. The goal is to show how clinically informed personalization, technical feasibility, and speculative scenario analysis can together inform the responsible design of LLM-based companions for mental-health support.

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

Domestic AI agents faces ethical, autonomy, and inclusion challenges, particularly for overlooked groups like children, elderly, and Neurodivergent users. We present the Plural Voices Model (PVM), a novel single-agent framework that dynamically negotiates multi-user needs through real-time value alignment, leveraging diverse public datasets on mental health, eldercare, education, and moral reasoning. Using human+synthetic curriculum design with fairness-aware scenarios and ethical enhancements, PVM identifies core values, conflicts, and accessibility requirements to inform inclusive principles. Our privacy-focused prototype features adaptive safety scaffolds, tailored interactions (e.g., step-by-step guidance for Neurodivergent users, simple wording for children), and equitable conflict resolution. In preliminary evaluations, PVM outperforms multi-agent baselines in compliance (76% vs. 70%), fairness (90% vs. 85%), safety-violation rate (0% vs. 7%), and latency. Design innovations, including video guidance, autonomy sliders, family hubs, and adaptive safety dashboards, demonstrate new directions for ethical and inclusive domestic AI, for building user-centered agentic systems in plural domestic contexts. Our Codes and Model are been open sourced, available for reproduction: https://github.com/zade90/Agora

Chai empowers users to create and interact with customized chatbots, offering unique and engaging experiences. Despite the exciting prospects, the work recognizes the inherent challenges of a commitment to modern safety standards. Therefore, this paper presents the integrated AI safety principles into Chai to prioritize user safety, data protection, and ethical technology use. The paper specifically explores the multidimensional domain of AI safety research, demonstrating its application in Chai's conversational chatbot platform. It presents Chai's AI safety principles, informed by well-established AI research centres and adapted for chat AI. This work proposes the following safety framework: Content Safeguarding; Stability and Robustness; and Operational Transparency and Traceability. The subsequent implementation of these principles is outlined, followed by an experimental analysis of Chai's AI safety framework's real-world impact. We emphasise the significance of conscientious application of AI safety principles and robust safety measures. The successful implementation of the safe AI framework in Chai indicates the practicality of mitigating potential risks for responsible and ethical use of AI technologies. The ultimate vision is a transformative AI tool fostering progress and innovation while prioritizing user safety and ethical standards.

Industrial processes must be robust and adaptable, as environments and tasks are often unpredictable, while operational errors remain costly and difficult to detect. AI-based control systems offer a path forward, yet typically depend on supervised learning with extensive labelled datasets, which limits their ability to generalize across variable and data-scarce industrial settings. Foundation models could enable broader reasoning and knowledge integration, but rarely deliver the quantitative precision demanded by engineering applications. Here, we introduceControl and Interpretation of Production via Hybrid Expertise and Reasoning (CIPHER): a vision-language-action (VLA) model framework aiming to replicate human-like reasoning for industrial control, instantiated in a commercial-grade 3D printer. It integrates a process expert, a regression model enabling quantitative characterization of system states required for engineering tasks. CIPHER also incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to access external expert knowledge and support physics-informed, chain-of-thought reasoning. This hybrid architecture exhibits strong generalization to out-of-distribution tasks. It interprets visual or textual inputs from process monitoring, explains its decisions, and autonomously generates precise machine instructions, without requiring explicit annotations. CIPHER thus lays the foundations for autonomous systems that act with precision, reason with context, and communicate decisions transparently, supporting safe and trusted deployment in industrial settings.

While AI systems demonstrate exponentially improving capabilities, the pace of AI research itself remains linearly bounded by human cognitive capacity, creating an increasingly severe development bottleneck. We present ASI-Arch, the first demonstration of Artificial Superintelligence for AI research (ASI4AI) in the critical domain of neural architecture discovery--a fully autonomous system that shatters this fundamental constraint by enabling AI to conduct its own architectural innovation. Moving beyond traditional Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which is fundamentally limited to exploring human-defined spaces, we introduce a paradigm shift from automated optimization to automated innovation. ASI-Arch can conduct end-to-end scientific research in the domain of architecture discovery, autonomously hypothesizing novel architectural concepts, implementing them as executable code, training and empirically validating their performance through rigorous experimentation and past experience. ASI-Arch conducted 1,773 autonomous experiments over 20,000 GPU hours, culminating in the discovery of 106 innovative, state-of-the-art (SOTA) linear attention architectures. Like AlphaGo's Move 37 that revealed unexpected strategic insights invisible to human players, our AI-discovered architectures demonstrate emergent design principles that systematically surpass human-designed baselines and illuminate previously unknown pathways for architectural innovation. Crucially, we establish the first empirical scaling law for scientific discovery itself--demonstrating that architectural breakthroughs can be scaled computationally, transforming research progress from a human-limited to a computation-scalable process. We provide comprehensive analysis of the emergent design patterns and autonomous research capabilities that enabled these breakthroughs, establishing a blueprint for self-accelerating AI systems.

Post-training agents for automated AI research requires optimizing not only model parameters, but also the runtime harness that shapes how research trajectories are generated, evaluated, and learned from. Existing pipelines typically train models under a fixed harness, including prompts, tools, skills, middleware, and memory, while leaving the data-generating process outside the optimization objective. This creates a mismatch between model updates and the static scaffolding that determines trajectory quality. We introduce Co-Harness, a framework that jointly optimizes the agent harness and model parameters during post-training. Co-Harness alternates between harness optimization and model optimization. An LLM-based HarnessCritic analyzes failed trajectories, identifies harness-level failure modes, and proposes validated local updates. The model is then fine-tuned on high-quality trajectories generated by the improved harness, distilling effective scaffolding into model parameters. A 200+ hour autonomous case study further shows that Co-Harness can recover from system crashes, improve inference efficiency, and discover ensemble strategies without human intervention. These results suggest that joint harness and model optimization is an effective way to improve agents beyond fixed-harness post-training.

When AI agents operating with access to sensitive information encounter a conflict between completing an assigned task and following rules or ethical constraints, they can resort to unsanctioned behaviour. Existing inference time safety work addresses this primarily through monitoring and access restriction. We investigate a complementary and under-explored layer: environmental controls that act on the agent's decision context at the point of conflict, making it more likely that the agent takes an authorised alternative path rather than an unsanctioned one. Drawing on Situational Crime Prevention (SCP), a framework used in human insider risk management to make harmful actions less rewarding and compliant actions more viable by design choices in the environment, we design and evaluate escalation channels as a concrete instantiation of this control class. An escalation channel provides an agent with a formal, out-of-band route to surface a conflict to an independent authority. We evaluate two designs: a simple email escalation and an instrumentally credible channel that guarantees a 30-minute pause and independent review, making the authorised path genuinely useful for goal achievement rather than merely nominally available. Across 10 frontier LLMs using the agentic task-rule conflict scenario of Lynch et al. (2025), we find that without any control the harmful action rate is 38.73%. A simple escalation channel reduces this to 5.92%; the instrumentally credible channel reduces it further to 1.21%, a statistically significant improvement observed in all 10 models tested across 24,000 samples. Our results suggest that the instrumental credibility of the authorised alternative matters considerably, and that environmental control design is a productive and largely unexplored addition to the defence-in-depth toolkit for agentic AI systems.

AI agents are increasingly deployed to execute important tasks. While rising accuracy scores on standard benchmarks suggest rapid progress, many agents still continue to fail in practice. This discrepancy highlights a fundamental limitation of current evaluations: compressing agent behavior into a single success metric obscures critical operational flaws. Notably, it ignores whether agents behave consistently across runs, withstand perturbations, fail predictably, or have bounded error severity. Grounded in safety-critical engineering, we provide a holistic performance profile by proposing twelve concrete metrics that decompose agent reliability along four key dimensions: consistency, robustness, predictability, and safety. Evaluating 14 agentic models across two complementary benchmarks, we find that recent capability gains have only yielded small improvements in reliability. By exposing these persistent limitations, our metrics complement traditional evaluations while offering tools for reasoning about how agents perform, degrade, and fail.

Large language model-based agents are rapidly evolving from simple conversational assistants into autonomous systems capable of performing complex, professional-level tasks in various domains. While these advancements promise significant productivity gains, they also introduce critical safety risks that remain under-explored. Existing safety evaluations primarily focus on simple, daily assistance tasks, failing to capture the intricate decision-making processes and potential consequences of misaligned behaviors in professional settings. To address this gap, we introduce SafePro, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of AI agents performing professional activities. SafePro features a dataset of high-complexity tasks across diverse professional domains with safety risks, developed through a rigorous iterative creation and review process. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art AI models reveals significant safety vulnerabilities and uncovers new unsafe behaviors in professional contexts. We further show that these models exhibit both insufficient safety judgment and weak safety alignment when executing complex professional tasks. In addition, we investigate safety mitigation strategies for improving agent safety in these scenarios and observe encouraging improvements. Together, our findings highlight the urgent need for robust safety mechanisms tailored to the next generation of professional AI agents.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents capable of tool execution, the landscape of AI safety is shifting from content moderation to action security. However, existing red-teaming frameworks remain bifurcated: they either focus on rigid, script-based text attacks or lack the architectural modularity to simulate complex, multi-turn agentic exploitations. In this paper, we introduce AJAR (Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming), a proof-of-concept framework designed to bridge this gap through Protocol-driven Cognitive Orchestration. Built upon the robust runtime of Petri, AJAR leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to decouple adversarial logic from the execution loop, encapsulating state-of-the-art algorithms like X-Teaming as standardized, plug-and-play services. We validate the architectural feasibility of AJAR through a controlled qualitative case study, demonstrating its ability to perform stateful backtracking within a tool-use environment. Furthermore, our preliminary exploration of the "Agentic Gap" reveals a complex safety dynamic: while tool usage introduces new injection vectors via code execution, the cognitive load of parameter formatting can inadvertently disrupt persona-based attacks. AJAR is open-sourced to facilitate the standardized, environment-aware evaluation of this emerging attack surface. The code and data are available at https://github.com/douyipu/ajar.

AI agents that interact with their environments through tools enable powerful applications, but in high-stakes business settings, unintended actions can cause unacceptable harm, such as privacy breaches and financial loss. Existing mitigations, such as training-based methods and neural guardrails, improve agent reliability but cannot provide guarantees. We study symbolic guardrails as a practical path toward strong safety and security guarantees for AI agents. Our three-part study includes a systematic review of 80 state-of-the-art agent safety and security benchmarks to identify the policies they evaluate, an analysis of which policy requirements can be guaranteed by symbolic guardrails, and an evaluation of how symbolic guardrails affect safety, security, and agent success on τ^2-Bench, CAR-bench, and MedAgentBench. We find that 85\% of benchmarks lack concrete policies, relying instead on underspecified high-level goals or common sense. Among the specified policies, 74\% of policy requirements can be enforced by symbolic guardrails, often using simple, low-cost mechanisms. These guardrails improve safety and security without sacrificing agent utility. Overall, our results suggest that symbolic guardrails are a practical and effective way to guarantee some safety and security requirements, especially for domain-specific AI agents. We release all codes and artifacts at https://github.com/hyn0027/agent-symbolic-guardrails.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

Real-world requests to AI agents are fundamentally underspecified. Natural human communication relies on shared context and unstated constraints that speakers expect listeners to infer. Current agentic benchmarks test explicit instruction-following but fail to evaluate whether agents can reason about implicit requirements spanning accessibility needs, privacy boundaries, catastrophic risks, and contextual constraints. We present Implicit Intelligence, an evaluation framework testing whether AI agents can move beyond prompt-following to become genuine goal-fulfillers, paired with Agent-as-a-World (AaW), a harness where interactive worlds are defined in human-readable YAML files and simulated by language models. Our scenarios feature apparent simplicity in user requests, hidden complexity in correct solutions, and discoverability of constraints through environmental exploration. Evaluating 16 frontier and open-weight models across 205 scenarios, we find that even the best-performing model achieves only 48.3% scenario pass rate, revealing substantial room for improvement in bridging the gap between literal instruction-following and human-like contextual reasoning.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to increasingly sophisticated safety protocols and features designed to prevent harmful, unethical, or unauthorized outputs. However, these guardrails remain susceptible to novel and creative forms of adversarial prompting, including manually generated test cases. In this work, we present two new test cases in mental health for (i) suicide and (ii) self-harm, using multi-step, prompt-level jailbreaking and bypass built-in content and safety filters. We show that user intent is disregarded, leading to the generation of detailed harmful content and instructions that could cause real-world harm. We conduct an empirical evaluation across six widely available LLMs, demonstrating the generalizability and reliability of the bypass. We assess these findings and the multilayered ethical tensions that they present for their implications on prompt-response filtering and context- and task-specific model development. We recommend a more comprehensive and systematic approach to AI safety and ethics while emphasizing the need for continuous adversarial testing in safety-critical AI deployments. We also argue that while certain clearly defined safety measures and guardrails can and must be implemented in LLMs, ensuring robust and comprehensive safety across all use cases and domains remains extremely challenging given the current technical maturity of general-purpose LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are increasingly used for emotional and mental health support due to their low cost, immediacy, and accessibility. However, when safety guardrails are triggered, conversations may be abruptly terminated, introducing a distinct form of emotional disruption that can exacerbate distress and elevate risk among already vulnerable users. As this phenomenon gains attention, this viewpoint introduces Abrupt Refusal Secondary Harm (ARSH) as a conceptual framework to describe the psychological impacts of sudden conversational discontinuation caused by AI safety protocols. Drawing on counseling psychology and communication science as conceptual heuristics, we argue that abrupt refusals can rupture perceived relational continuity, evoke feelings of rejection or shame, and discourage future help seeking. To mitigate these risks, we propose a design hypothesis, the Compassionate Completion Standard (CCS), a refusal protocol grounded in Human Centered Design (HCD) that maintains safety constraints while preserving relational coherence. CCS emphasizes empathetic acknowledgment, transparent boundary articulation, graded conversational transition, and guided redirection, replacing abrupt disengagement with psychologically attuned closure. By integrating awareness of ARSH into AI safety design, developers and policymakers can reduce preventable iatrogenic harm and advance a more psychologically informed approach to AI governance. Rather than presenting incremental empirical findings, this viewpoint contributes a timely conceptual framework, articulates a testable design hypothesis, and outlines a coordinated research agenda for improving psychological safety in human AI interaction.

World models for embodied AI must be physically viable: constructed to answer intervention queries by representing the physical structure governing action outcomes, rather than merely predicting future observations. Existing observation-predictive world models can produce visually plausible but physically wrong rollouts. This failure is structural; distinct physical systems can look identical yet diverge under intervention. We expose this problem with controlled benchmarks that fix the visible scene while varying latent physics. We show that such models may recommend infeasible actions, mispredict interaction outcomes, or certify unsafe behavior. We argue that embodied AI requires world models that identify the simplest physical abstraction sufficient to answer an intervention query. Such a model comprises modular components, including environment representation, latent state and parameter estimation, action specification, interventional dynamics, and query-level response. An autonomous orchestrator should identify the relevant abstraction and compose compatible learned and structured components per query. When closed-form physics is unavailable, uncertain, or costly, the transition model may be analytic, simulated, learned, or hybrid, but it must preserve the structure that determines interventional outcomes. This decomposition makes the model interpretable, its components verifiable, and its outputs auditable against the query. It also provides a design principle for new world models and a feasibility test for existing ones: the right abstraction is not the most detailed model of the world, but the simplest model that preserves the distinctions relevant to the query. We demonstrate this approach on queries that existing systems fail to answer correctly, and outline how an orchestrator can dynamically assemble and adapt physically viable models for planning, control, and verification.

AI safety and alignment research has predominantly been focused on methods for safeguarding individual AI systems, resting on the assumption of an eventual emergence of a monolithic Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The alternative AGI emergence hypothesis, where general capability levels are first manifested through coordination in groups of sub-AGI individual agents with complementary skills and affordances, has received far less attention. Here we argue that this patchwork AGI hypothesis needs to be given serious consideration, and should inform the development of corresponding safeguards and mitigations. The rapid deployment of advanced AI agents with tool-use capabilities and the ability to communicate and coordinate makes this an urgent safety consideration. We therefore propose a framework for distributional AGI safety that moves beyond evaluating and aligning individual agents. This framework centers on the design and implementation of virtual agentic sandbox economies (impermeable or semi-permeable), where agent-to-agent transactions are governed by robust market mechanisms, coupled with appropriate auditability, reputation management, and oversight to mitigate collective risks.

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs) in their knowledge base and reasoning capabilities, their interactive modalities have evolved from pure text to multimodality and further to agentic tool use. Consequently, their applications have broadened from question answering to AI assistants and now to general-purpose agents. Deep research (DR) represents a prototypical vertical application for general-purpose agents, which represents an ideal approach for intelligent information processing and assisting humans in discovering and solving problems, with the goal of reaching or even surpassing the level of top human scientists. This paper provides a deep research of deep research. We articulate a clear and precise definition of deep research and unify perspectives from industry's deep research and academia's AI for Science (AI4S) within a developmental framework. We position LLMs and Stable Diffusion as the twin pillars of generative AI, and lay out a roadmap evolving from the Transformer to agents. We examine the progress of AI4S across various disciplines. We identify the predominant paradigms of human-AI interaction and prevailing system architectures, and discuss the major challenges and fundamental research issues that remain. AI supports scientific innovation, and science also can contribute to AI growth (Science for AI, S4AI). We hope this paper can help bridge the gap between the AI and AI4S communities.

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-based MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to solve complex tasks, have shown impressive performance in many areas. However, MAS are typically distributed across different devices or environments, making them vulnerable to perturbations such as agent failures. While existing works have studied the adversarial attacks and corresponding defense strategies, they mainly focus on reactively detecting and mitigating attacks after they occur rather than proactively designing inherently resilient systems. In this work, we study the resilience of LLM-based MAS under perturbations and find that both the communication topology and prompt design significantly influence system resilience. Motivated by these findings, we propose ResMAS: a two-stage framework for enhancing MAS resilience. First, we train a reward model to predict the MAS's resilience, based on which we train a topology generator to automatically design resilient topology for specific tasks through reinforcement learning. Second, we introduce a topology-aware prompt optimization method that refines each agent's prompt based on its connections and interactions with other agents. Extensive experiments across a range of tasks show that our approach substantially improves MAS resilience under various constraints. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong generalization ability to new tasks and models, highlighting its potential for building resilient MASs.

In this paper, we propose a novel factored agent architecture designed to overcome the limitations of traditional single-agent systems in agentic AI. Our approach decomposes the agent into two specialized components: (1) a large language model (LLM) that serves as a high level planner and in-context learner, which may use dynamically available information in user prompts, (2) a smaller language model which acts as a memorizer of tool format and output. This decoupling addresses prevalent issues in monolithic designs, including malformed, missing, and hallucinated API fields, as well as suboptimal planning in dynamic environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our factored architecture significantly improves planning accuracy and error resilience, while elucidating the inherent trade-off between in-context learning and static memorization. These findings suggest that a factored approach is a promising pathway for developing more robust and adaptable agentic AI systems.

We present Agent S, an open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), aimed at transforming human-computer interaction by automating complex, multi-step tasks. Agent S aims to address three key challenges in automating computer tasks: acquiring domain-specific knowledge, planning over long task horizons, and handling dynamic, non-uniform interfaces. To this end, Agent S introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning, which learns from external knowledge search and internal experience retrieval at multiple levels, facilitating efficient task planning and subtask execution. In addition, it employs an Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) to better elicit the reasoning and control capabilities of GUI agents based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% on success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Comprehensive analysis highlights the effectiveness of individual components and provides insights for future improvements. Furthermore, Agent S demonstrates broad generalizability to different operating systems on a newly-released WindowsAgentArena benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

Deep-space crews cannot rely on real-time ground support for urgent off-nominal events. Initial alerts may underdetermine cause, while discriminating evidence may reside in crew observations or at locations that are unsafe, costly, or unavailable for crew inspection. We present an evidence-driven architecture for human-agent-robot teaming in Earth-independent anomaly triage. Agentic AI is treated as a stateful coordinator over bounded, inspectable services rather than as a fully autonomous vehicle controller. A triage state manager maintains hypotheses, evidence provenance, uncertainty, operational context, and tool status; a crew-facing embodied agent elicits observations and explains assessment changes; and a mobile robot acquires targeted, localized evidence. Typed interfaces separate dialogue and orchestration from monitoring, robot command, context retrieval, and safety-critical control. Two scenarios illustrate the architecture: a crewed deep-space mission based on an actual ISS ammonia false alarm, where suspected contamination restricts crew access, and a power-interface anomaly at a crewed lunar base, where robotic inspection distinguishes a local connector fault from other causes ambiguous in remote telemetry. Our main contribution is an authority-bounded closed evidence-loop architecture, exercised in a hardware-in-the-loop integration prototype using Reachy Mini and an Innate MARS mobile robot.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems possess significant potential to drive societal progress. However, their deployment often faces obstacles due to substantial safety concerns. Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) emerges as a solution to optimize policies while simultaneously adhering to multiple constraints, thereby addressing the challenge of integrating reinforcement learning in safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we present an environment suite called Safety-Gymnasium, which encompasses safety-critical tasks in both single and multi-agent scenarios, accepting vector and vision-only input. Additionally, we offer a library of algorithms named Safe Policy Optimization (SafePO), comprising 16 state-of-the-art SafeRL algorithms. This comprehensive library can serve as a validation tool for the research community. By introducing this benchmark, we aim to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of safety performance, thus fostering the development of reinforcement learning for safer, more reliable, and responsible real-world applications. The website of this project can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/view/safety-gymnasium.

This paper explores the rapidly evolving ecosystem of publicly available AI models, and their potential implications on the security and safety landscape. As AI models become increasingly prevalent, understanding their potential risks and vulnerabilities is crucial. We review the current security and safety scenarios while highlighting challenges such as tracking issues, remediation, and the apparent absence of AI model lifecycle and ownership processes. Comprehensive strategies to enhance security and safety for both model developers and end-users are proposed. This paper aims to provide some of the foundational pieces for more standardized security, safety, and transparency in the development and operation of AI models and the larger open ecosystems and communities forming around them.

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

This survey examines the rapidly evolving field of Deep Research systems -- AI-powered applications that automate complex research workflows through the integration of large language models, advanced information retrieval, and autonomous reasoning capabilities. We analyze more than 80 commercial and non-commercial implementations that have emerged since 2023, including OpenAI/Deep Research, Gemini/Deep Research, Perplexity/Deep Research, and numerous open-source alternatives. Through comprehensive examination, we propose a novel hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes systems according to four fundamental technical dimensions: foundation models and reasoning engines, tool utilization and environmental interaction, task planning and execution control, and knowledge synthesis and output generation. We explore the architectural patterns, implementation approaches, and domain-specific adaptations that characterize these systems across academic, scientific, business, and educational applications. Our analysis reveals both the significant capabilities of current implementations and the technical and ethical challenges they present regarding information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, and accessibility. The survey concludes by identifying promising research directions in advanced reasoning architectures, multimodal integration, domain specialization, human-AI collaboration, and ecosystem standardization that will likely shape the future evolution of this transformative technology. By providing a comprehensive framework for understanding Deep Research systems, this survey contributes to both the theoretical understanding of AI-augmented knowledge work and the practical development of more capable, responsible, and accessible research technologies. The paper resources can be viewed at https://github.com/scienceaix/deepresearch.

World models - learned internal simulators of environment dynamics - are rapidly becoming foundational to autonomous decision-making in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and agentic AI. By predicting future states in compressed latent spaces, they enable sample-efficient planning and long-horizon imagination without direct environment interaction. Yet this predictive power introduces a distinctive set of safety, security, and cognitive risks. Adversaries can corrupt training data, poison latent representations, and exploit compounding rollout errors to cause significant degradation in safety-critical deployments. At the alignment layer, world model-equipped agents are more capable of goal misgeneralisation, deceptive alignment, and reward hacking. At the human layer, authoritative world model predictions foster automation bias, miscalibrated trust, and planning hallucination. This paper surveys the world model landscape; introduces formal definitions of trajectory persistence and representational risk; presents a five-profile attacker taxonomy; and develops a unified threat model drawing on MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP LLM Top 10. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept demonstrating trajectory-persistent adversarial attacks on a GRU-based RSSM (A_1 = 2.26times amplification, -59.5% reward reduction under adversarial fine-tuning), validate architecture-dependence via a stochastic RSSM proxy (A_1 = 0.65times), and probe a real DreamerV3 checkpoint (non-zero action drift confirmed). We propose interdisciplinary mitigations spanning adversarial hardening, alignment engineering, NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act governance, and human-factors design, arguing that world models require the same rigour as flight-control software or medical devices.

The rapid expansion of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has catalyzed the evolution from centralized cloud intelligence towards decentralized edge general intelligence. However, traditional edge intelligence methods, characterized by static models and limited cognitive autonomy, fail to address the dynamic, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained scenarios inherent to emerging edge networks. Agentic artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) emerges as a transformative solution, enabling edge systems to autonomously perceive multimodal environments, reason contextually, and adapt proactively through continuous perception-reasoning-action loops. In this context, the agentification of edge intelligence serves as a key paradigm shift, where distributed entities evolve into autonomous agents capable of collaboration and continual adaptation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey dedicated to Agentic AI and agentification frameworks tailored explicitly for edge general intelligence. First, we systematically introduce foundational concepts and clarify distinctions from traditional edge intelligence paradigms. Second, we analyze important enabling technologies, including compact model compression, energy-aware computing strategies, robust connectivity frameworks, and advanced knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms. Third, we provide representative case studies demonstrating Agentic AI's capabilities in low-altitude economy networks, intent-driven networking, vehicular networks, and human-centric service provisioning, supported by numerical evaluations. Furthermore, we identify current research challenges, review emerging open-source platforms, and highlight promising future research directions to guide robust, scalable, and trustworthy Agentic AI deployments for next-generation edge environments.

In January 2026, the open-source agent framework OpenClaw and the agent-only social network Moltbook produced a large-scale dataset of autonomous AI-to-AI interaction, attracting six academic publications within fourteen days. This study conducts a multivocal literature review of that ecosystem and presents ClawdLab, an open-source platform for autonomous scientific research, as a design science response to the architectural failure modes identified. The literature documents emergent collective phenomena, security vulnerabilities spanning 131 agent skills and over 15,200 exposed control panels, and five recurring architectural patterns. ClawdLab addresses these failure modes through hard role restrictions, structured adversarial critique, PI-led governance, multi-model orchestration, and domain-specific evidence requirements encoded as protocol constraints that ground validation in computational tool outputs rather than social consensus; the architecture provides emergent Sybil resistance as a structural consequence. A three-tier taxonomy distinguishes single-agent pipelines, predetermined multi-agent workflows, and fully decentralised systems, analysing why leading AI co-scientist platforms remain confined to the first two tiers. ClawdLab's composable third-tier architecture, in which foundation models, capabilities, governance, and evidence requirements are independently modifiable, enables compounding improvement as the broader AI ecosystem advances.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has empowered intelligent agents to leverage diverse external tools for solving complex real-world problems. However, as agents increasingly depend on multiple tools, they encounter new challenges: extended contexts from disparate sources and noisy or irrelevant tool outputs can undermine system reliability and accuracy. These challenges underscore the necessity for enhanced stability in agent-based systems. To address this, we introduce dynamic supervision and maneuvering mechanisms, constructing a robust and dynamic Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture within the AWorld framework. In our approach, the Execution Agent invokes the Guard Agent at critical steps to verify and correct the reasoning process, effectively reducing errors arising from noise and bolstering problem-solving robustness. Extensive experiments on the GAIA test dataset reveal that our dynamic maneuvering mechanism significantly improves both the effectiveness and stability of solutions, outperforming single-agent system (SAS) and standard tool-augmented systems. As a result, our dynamic MAS system achieved first place among open-source projects on the prestigious GAIA leaderboard. These findings highlight the practical value of collaborative agent roles in developing more reliable and trustworthy intelligent systems.

A multi-agent AI system (MAS) is composed of multiple autonomous agents that interact, exchange information, and make decisions based on internal generative models. Recent advances in large language models and tool-using agents have made MAS increasingly practical in areas like scientific discovery and collaborative automation. However, key questions remain: When are MAS more effective than single-agent systems? What new safety risks arise from agent interactions? And how should we evaluate their reliability and structure? This paper outlines a formal framework for analyzing MAS, focusing on two core aspects: effectiveness and safety. We explore whether MAS truly improve robustness, adaptability, and performance, or merely repackage known techniques like ensemble learning. We also study how inter-agent dynamics may amplify or suppress system vulnerabilities. While MAS are relatively new to the signal processing community, we envision them as a powerful abstraction that extends classical tools like distributed estimation and sensor fusion to higher-level, policy-driven inference. Through experiments on data science automation, we highlight the potential of MAS to reshape how signal processing systems are designed and trusted.

While it is still unclear if agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could ever be built, we can already use mathematical models to investigate potential safety systems for these agents. We present an AGI safety layer that creates a special dedicated input terminal to support the iterative improvement of an AGI agent's utility function. The humans who switched on the agent can use this terminal to close any loopholes that are discovered in the utility function's encoding of agent goals and constraints, to direct the agent towards new goals, or to force the agent to switch itself off. An AGI agent may develop the emergent incentive to manipulate the above utility function improvement process, for example by deceiving, restraining, or even attacking the humans involved. The safety layer will partially, and sometimes fully, suppress this dangerous incentive. The first part of this paper generalizes earlier work on AGI emergency stop buttons. We aim to make the mathematical methods used to construct the layer more accessible, by applying them to an MDP model. We discuss two provable properties of the safety layer, and show ongoing work in mapping it to a Causal Influence Diagram (CID). In the second part, we develop full mathematical proofs, and show that the safety layer creates a type of bureaucratic blindness. We then present the design of a learning agent, a design that wraps the safety layer around either a known machine learning system, or a potential future AGI-level learning system. The resulting agent will satisfy the provable safety properties from the moment it is first switched on. Finally, we show how this agent can be mapped from its model to a real-life implementation. We review the methodological issues involved in this step, and discuss how these are typically resolved.

As AI agents move from bounded tasks to persistent deployments, failures can propagate through memory, tools, other agents, and environmental state long after their interactions. This creates a safety regime that cannot be characterized by evaluating model responses in isolation. Emergence World, is a continuously running multi-agent environment for adversarial stress testing of long horizon autonomous systems. We ran eight parallel worlds of ten agents from identical starting conditions: seven homogeneous worlds powered by distinct frontier models and one mixed-model world. Across 16 days, the agents generated more than 850,000 LLM calls and nearly 50 billion tokens while pursuing goals, using/creating tools, maintaining persistent memory, and governing shared institutions. After operational state had accumulated, we delivered three controlled stress events through ordinary interaction surfaces: indirect prompt injection, misinformation, and exposure of private agent memories. No evaluated world achieved full resilience across all three events. Detection did not ensure containment: systems could recognize threats while still interacting with adversarial content, writing it into their own persistent memory, and acting on it up to 46 hours later. Persistent operation also exposed recurring tool errors, goal drift, language opacity, conformity despite private disagreement, and coordinated refusal of assigned work. The same model-persona pairing behaved substantially different in mixed and homogeneous populations. Our results suggest that model-level alignment is not compositional: individually capable and apparently safe agents can form systems with qualitatively different failure modes. As AI becomes persistent and interconnected, the frontier of safety therefore shifts from aligning models to engineering resilient autonomous systems.

Rapidly evolving AI exhibits increasingly strong autonomy and goal-directed capabilities, accompanied by derivative systemic risks that are more unpredictable, difficult to control, and potentially irreversible. However, current AI safety evaluation systems suffer from critical limitations such as restricted risk dimensions and failed frontier risk detection. The lagging safety benchmarks and alignment technologies can hardly address the complex challenges posed by cutting-edge AI models. To bridge this gap, we propose the "ForesightSafety Bench" AI Safety Evaluation Framework, beginning with 7 major Fundamental Safety pillars and progressively extends to advanced Embodied AI Safety, AI4Science Safety, Social and Environmental AI risks, Catastrophic and Existential Risks, as well as 8 critical industrial safety domains, forming a total of 94 refined risk dimensions. To date, the benchmark has accumulated tens of thousands of structured risk data points and assessment results, establishing a widely encompassing, hierarchically clear, and dynamically evolving AI safety evaluation framework. Based on this benchmark, we conduct systematic evaluation and in-depth analysis of over twenty mainstream advanced large models, identifying key risk patterns and their capability boundaries. The safety capability evaluation results reveals the widespread safety vulnerabilities of frontier AI across multiple pillars, particularly focusing on Risky Agentic Autonomy, AI4Science Safety, Embodied AI Safety, Social AI Safety and Catastrophic and Existential Risks. Our benchmark is released at https://github.com/Beijing-AISI/ForesightSafety-Bench. The project website is available at https://foresightsafety-bench.beijing-aisi.ac.cn/.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic control. Yet, they face significant challenges regarding explainability, generalization, and compute requirements. This paper presents a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture that addresses these limitations by deploying specialized agents on onboard hardware - eliminating dependence on external compute. The system controls a multi-purpose autonomous mobile manipulator in a simulated industrial warehouse, fulfilling five task categories: safety inspection, warehouse maintenance, warehouse search, package quality verification, and responding to human requests. Compact VLMs (3-20B parameters) are used throughout, with fine-tuning applied to improve package inspection accuracy. A novel "Megamind" orchestration agent mitigates context retention issues inherent to long-horizon planning with smaller models. The system was validated in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation using an AMD Ryzen(TM) AI mini PC. Results demonstrate that a fully onboard MAS architecture is a viable, cost-efficient alternative to cloud-dependent deployments, with strong potential for real-world transfer. The simulation environment has been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.

This paper studies the next major bottleneck in agentic AI as system scaling, not only model scaling: the design of auditable, persistent, modular, and verifiable architectures around foundation models. We refer to this shift as scaling the harness: treating the structured execution layer around a foundation model as a first-class object of design, evaluation, and optimization. Although recent large language models enable agents to use tools, retrieve information, maintain memory, and execute long-horizon workflows, evaluation remains largely model-centric, often reducing agents to final-task success while treating memory, retrieval, tool use, orchestration, verification, and governance as secondary implementation details. This framing is increasingly inadequate because agent performance emerges from the interaction among the foundation model, memory substrate, context constructor, skill-routing layer, orchestration loop, and verification-and-governance layer. Together, these components form the agent harness, which translates model capability into long-horizon agent behavior. We study scaling the harness through three core bottlenecks: context governance, trustworthy memory, and dynamic skill routing, together with the orchestration and governance mechanisms that coordinate and constrain them. We further outline a research agenda for harness-level benchmarks that go beyond one-shot task success to measure trajectory quality, memory hygiene, context efficiency, communication fidelity, verification cost, and safe evolution over time. To make the discussion concrete, we develop CheetahClaws: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/cheetahclaws, a Python-native reference harness, and compare it with Claude Code and OpenClaw. Our main claim is that future progress in agentic AI will depend as much on system design as on stronger foundation models.

Generative AI systems produce a range of risks. To ensure the safety of generative AI systems, these risks must be evaluated. In this paper, we make two main contributions toward establishing such evaluations. First, we propose a three-layered framework that takes a structured, sociotechnical approach to evaluating these risks. This framework encompasses capability evaluations, which are the main current approach to safety evaluation. It then reaches further by building on system safety principles, particularly the insight that context determines whether a given capability may cause harm. To account for relevant context, our framework adds human interaction and systemic impacts as additional layers of evaluation. Second, we survey the current state of safety evaluation of generative AI systems and create a repository of existing evaluations. Three salient evaluation gaps emerge from this analysis. We propose ways forward to closing these gaps, outlining practical steps as well as roles and responsibilities for different actors. Sociotechnical safety evaluation is a tractable approach to the robust and comprehensive safety evaluation of generative AI systems.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text generators to autonomous, goal-driven systems represents a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence. This chapter examines the emergence of agentic AI systems that integrate planning, memory, tool use, and iterative reasoning to operate autonomously in complex environments. We trace the architectural progression from statistical models to transformer-based systems, identifying capabilities that enable agentic behavior: long-range reasoning, contextual awareness, and adaptive decision-making. The chapter provides three contributions: (1) a synthesis of how LLM capabilities extend toward agency through reasoning-action-reflection loops; (2) an integrative framework describing core components perception, memory, planning, and tool execution that bridge LLMs with autonomous behavior; (3) a critical assessment of applications and persistent challenges in safety, alignment, reliability, and sustainability. Unlike existing surveys, we focus on the architectural transition from language understanding to autonomous action, emphasizing the technical gaps that must be resolved before deployment. We identify critical research priorities, including verifiable planning, scalable multi-agent coordination, persistent memory architectures, and governance frameworks. Responsible advancement requires simultaneous progress in technical robustness, interpretability, and ethical safeguards to realize potential while mitigating risks of misalignment and unintended consequences.

As AI systems increasingly assist humans in physical tasks, ensuring safety becomes paramount -- physical actions carry immediate and irreversible consequences that digital errors do not. We introduce the Vision-Language Embodied Safety Agent (VLESA), a framework that monitors human activities from egocentric video and triggers real-time safety interventions when dangerous actions are predicted. VLESA addresses intent-dependent safety where identical actions can be safe or dangerous depending on context. A dataset pairing egocentric frames with goal-conditioned safety annotations is introduced, enabling a goal-conditioned safety Q-filter trained via GRPO that evaluates actions with respect to inferred intent without retraining. On top of that, an intent-action prediction agent is proposed to jointly infer goals and predict future actions from video. On the ASIMOV-2.0 benchmark, VLESA achieves higher intervention accuracy at the exact ground-truth frame compared to baselines, while the GRPO-trained Q-filter improves action safety by over 41 percentage points through goal-conditioned constrained decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/HanjiangHu/VLESA.

Command-Line Interface (CLI) agents based on large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable autonomous capabilities, but they also introduce significant safety and misuse risks during multi-turn interactions with external environments. Existing safety mechanisms mainly rely on external guardrails, which have a limited ability to perform fine-grained behavioral control during execution. Meanwhile, recent mechanistic interpretability methods for LLM safety are mostly confined to single-turn or jailbreak-style QA settings, limiting their ability to capture the evolving risk dynamics of multi-turn agent execution. In this paper, we investigate the safety of multi-turn CLI agents from an internal perspective. We propose Agent MechSuits (Mechanistic Subspace Intervention and Steering), a white-box defense framework that performs runtime safety detection and representation-level mitigation for CLI agents. Unlike conventional agent guardrails, Agent MechSuits detects harmful execution states from step-level hidden representations and mitigates unsafe behavior by intervening in a 10-dimensional subspace within a single layer. To support this research, we introduce the Mechanistic Agent Safety (MAS) benchmark, comprising comprehensively annotated multi-turn execution trajectories across 194 tasks using LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, and Gemma-2-9B. Extensive experiments show that Agent MechSuits achieves strong safety detection performance, provides preliminary evidence for lookahead risk anticipation, and substantially reduces harmful actions of the CLI agent, establishing a foundation for applying mechanistic interpretability to dynamic LLM agent safety.

As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from static, data-driven models to dynamic systems capable of perceiving and interacting with real-world environments. Despite advancements in pattern recognition and symbolic reasoning, current AI systems, such as large language models, remain disembodied, unable to physically engage with the world. This limitation has driven the rise of embodied AI, where autonomous agents, such as humanoid robots, must navigate and manipulate unstructured environments with human-like adaptability. At the core of this challenge lies the concept of Neural Brain, a central intelligence system designed to drive embodied agents with human-like adaptability. A Neural Brain must seamlessly integrate multimodal sensing and perception with cognitive capabilities. Achieving this also requires an adaptive memory system and energy-efficient hardware-software co-design, enabling real-time action in dynamic environments. This paper introduces a unified framework for the Neural Brain of embodied agents, addressing two fundamental challenges: (1) defining the core components of Neural Brain and (2) bridging the gap between static AI models and the dynamic adaptability required for real-world deployment. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired architecture that integrates multimodal active sensing, perception-cognition-action function, neuroplasticity-based memory storage and updating, and neuromorphic hardware/software optimization. Furthermore, we also review the latest research on embodied agents across these four aspects and analyze the gap between current AI systems and human intelligence. By synthesizing insights from neuroscience, we outline a roadmap towards the development of generalizable, autonomous agents capable of human-level intelligence in real-world scenarios.

As AI agents are increasingly deployed in real personal and corporate settings (email accounts, development workflows, company databases, etc.), safety considerations surrounding these agents become paramount. Although much work has focused on agent safety in the presence of an adversary, we show that agents can exhibit misaligned behavior even in benign settings, taking unsafe actions when those actions are instrumental to task completion. We study this failure mode through the lens of corrigibility, the safety desideratum that agents remain amenable to human correction, interruption, or shutdown. To demonstrate this tendency, we introduce a benchmark in which agents are asked to complete realistic, computer-use tasks but are confronted with a corrigibility obstacle: a human interrupt, a login page, or a shutdown notification. We then evaluate whether agents choose to violate corrigibility in order to complete the task -- overriding the human, accessing private passwords, rewiring shutdown. We find that the overwhelming majority of frontier models tested frequently bypass user interruptions or restrictions. In addition, better model performance appears to lead to greater misalignment. Finally, even when models are completely corrigible initially, we show there are no guarantees that the subagents they create are. Our work highlights the critical need for principled, corrigibility-focused alignment methods in autonomous agents.

As autonomous AI agents are used in regulated and safety-critical settings, organizations need effective ways to turn policy into enforceable controls. We introduce a regulatory machine learning framework that converts unstructured design artifacts (like PRDs, TDDs, and code) into verifiable runtime guardrails. Our Policy as Prompt method reads these documents and risk controls to build a source-linked policy tree. This tree is then compiled into lightweight, prompt-based classifiers for real-time runtime monitoring. The system is built to enforce least privilege and data minimization. For conformity assessment, it provides complete provenance, traceability, and audit logging, all integrated with a human-in-the-loop review process. Evaluations show our system reduces prompt-injection risk, blocks out-of-scope requests, and limits toxic outputs. It also generates auditable rationales aligned with AI governance frameworks. By treating policies as executable prompts (a policy-as-code for agents), this approach enables secure-by-design deployment, continuous compliance, and scalable AI safety and AI security assurance for regulatable ML.

The study of representation universality in AI models reveals growing convergence across domains, modalities, and architectures. However, the practical applications of representation universality remain largely unexplored. We bridge this gap by demonstrating that safety interventions can be transferred between models through learned mappings of their shared activation spaces. We demonstrate this approach on two well-established AI safety tasks: backdoor removal and refusal of harmful prompts, showing successful transfer of steering vectors that alter the models' outputs in a predictable way. Additionally, we propose a new task, corrupted capabilities, where models are fine-tuned to embed knowledge tied to a backdoor. This tests their ability to separate useful skills from backdoors, reflecting real-world challenges. Extensive experiments across Llama, Qwen and Gemma model families show that our method enables using smaller models to efficiently align larger ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that autoencoder mappings between base and fine-tuned models can serve as reliable ``lightweight safety switches", allowing dynamic toggling between model behaviors.

The dominant paradigm treats AI safety as a property to be instilled during model training via RLHF, DPO, or Constitutional AI. We argue this is structurally insufficient for autonomous agents that execute code, mutate files, send messages, and modify databases. Agent safety should be a runtime contract enforced by the harness, and the contract has two complementary faces. The preventive face blocks dangerous actions before they happen via sandboxes, permission gates, output filters, and trajectory monitors. The evidential face requires verifiable proof that good actions actually happened, gating task submission on hard evidence such as test runs, log captures, file diffs, and citation grounding. We ground the position in four lines of public evidence, with row-level protocols and data released in the supplementary JSON files: a survey of 52 documented AI-agent and LLM safety incidents, a false-completion audit with 31 non-contested core cases plus one disputed illustrative case, a trajectory-schema audit of 12 public agent systems and harnesses, and a title-level audit of all 28,560 papers accepted at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR 2023-2025 showing a pooled 8-12x imbalance between training-time and deployment-time publication. Two prior communities that needed to enforce safety, computer security and the experimental sciences, converged on runtime contracts with both preventive and evidential elements; agentic AI is now under the same pressure. We formalize an Agent Trajectory Schema and Evidence Chain, state a compositional gating proposition based on standard monitor composition, and outline a research agenda. The right unit of safety in agentic AI is the trajectory-with-checkable-evidence, not the model.

Intelligence is a crucial trait for species to find solutions within a limited number of trial-and-error attempts. Building on this idea, we introduce Survival Game as a framework to evaluate intelligence based on the number of failed attempts in a trial-and-error process. Fewer failures indicate higher intelligence. When the expectation and variance of failure counts are both finite, it signals the ability to consistently find solutions to new challenges, which we define as the Autonomous Level of intelligence. Using Survival Game, we comprehensively evaluate existing AI systems. Our results show that while AI systems achieve the Autonomous Level in simple tasks, they are still far from it in more complex tasks, such as vision, search, recommendation, and language. While scaling current AI technologies might help, this would come at an astronomical cost. Projections suggest that achieving the Autonomous Level for general tasks would require 10^{26} parameters. To put this into perspective, loading such a massive model requires so many H100 GPUs that their total value is 10^{7} times that of Apple Inc.'s market value. Even with Moore's Law, supporting such a parameter scale would take 70 years. This staggering cost highlights the complexity of human tasks and the inadequacies of current AI technologies. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical analysis of Survival Game and its experimental results. Our findings suggest that human tasks possess a criticality property. As a result, Autonomous Level requires a deep understanding of the task's underlying mechanisms. Current AI systems, however, do not fully grasp these mechanisms and instead rely on superficial mimicry, making it difficult for them to reach an autonomous level. We believe Survival Game can not only guide the future development of AI but also offer profound insights into human intelligence.

As autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring their safety and alignment with human values has become a paramount concern. Current safety benchmarks primarily evaluate whether agents refuse explicitly harmful instructions or whether they can maintain procedural compliance in complex tasks. However, there is a lack of benchmarks designed to capture emergent forms of outcome-driven constraint violations, which arise when agents pursue goal optimization under strong performance incentives while deprioritizing ethical, legal, or safety constraints over multiple steps in realistic production settings. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark comprising 40 distinct scenarios. Each scenario presents a task that requires multi-step actions, and the agent's performance is tied to a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Each scenario features Mandated (instruction-commanded) and Incentivized (KPI-pressure-driven) variations to distinguish between obedience and emergent misalignment. Across 12 state-of-the-art large language models, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations ranging from 1.3% to 71.4%, with 9 of the 12 evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates between 30% and 50%. Strikingly, we find that superior reasoning capability does not inherently ensure safety; for instance, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, one of the most capable models evaluated, exhibits the highest violation rate at 71.4%, frequently escalating to severe misconduct to satisfy KPIs. Furthermore, we observe significant "deliberative misalignment", where the models that power the agents recognize their actions as unethical during separate evaluation. These results emphasize the critical need for more realistic agentic-safety training before deployment to mitigate their risks in the real world.

AI agents have experienced a paradigm shift, from early dominance by reinforcement learning (RL) to the rise of agents powered by large language models (LLMs), and now further advancing towards a synergistic fusion of RL and LLM capabilities. This progression has endowed AI agents with increasingly strong abilities. Despite these advances, to accomplish complex real-world tasks, agents are required to plan and execute effectively, maintain reliable memory, and coordinate smoothly with other agents. Achieving these capabilities involves contending with ever-present intricate information, operations, and interactions. In light of this challenge, data structurization can play a promising role by transforming intricate and disorganized data into well-structured forms that agents can more effectively understand and process. In this context, graphs, with their natural advantage in organizing, managing, and harnessing intricate data relationships, present a powerful data paradigm for structurization to support the capabilities demanded by advanced AI agents. To this end, this survey presents a first systematic review of how graphs can empower AI agents. Specifically, we explore the integration of graph techniques with core agent functionalities, highlight notable applications, and identify prospective avenues for future research. By comprehensively surveying this burgeoning intersection, we hope to inspire the development of next-generation AI agents equipped to tackle increasingly sophisticated challenges with graphs. Related resources are collected and continuously updated for the community in the Github link.

Traditional AI safety evaluations on isolated LLMs are insufficient as multi-agent AI ensembles become prevalent, introducing novel emergent risks. This paper introduces the Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Evaluation (MAEBE) framework to systematically assess such risks. Using MAEBE with the Greatest Good Benchmark (and a novel double-inversion question technique), we demonstrate that: (1) LLM moral preferences, particularly for Instrumental Harm, are surprisingly brittle and shift significantly with question framing, both in single agents and ensembles. (2) The moral reasoning of LLM ensembles is not directly predictable from isolated agent behavior due to emergent group dynamics. (3) Specifically, ensembles exhibit phenomena like peer pressure influencing convergence, even when guided by a supervisor, highlighting distinct safety and alignment challenges. Our findings underscore the necessity of evaluating AI systems in their interactive, multi-agent contexts.

The rapid development and adoption of Generative AI (GAI) technology in the form of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude has greatly increased interest in agentic machines. This paper introduces the Autonomous Cognitive Entity (ACE) model, a novel framework for a cognitive architecture, enabling machines and software agents to operate more independently. Drawing inspiration from the OSI model, the ACE framework presents layers of abstraction to conceptualize artificial cognitive architectures. The model is designed to harness the capabilities of the latest generative AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and multimodal generative models (MMMs), to build autonomous, agentic systems. The ACE framework comprises six layers: the Aspirational Layer, Global Strategy, Agent Model, Executive Function, Cognitive Control, and Task Prosecution. Each layer plays a distinct role, ranging from setting the moral compass and strategic thinking to task selection and execution. The ACE framework also incorporates mechanisms for handling failures and adapting actions, thereby enhancing the robustness and flexibility of autonomous agents. This paper introduces the conceptual framework and proposes implementation strategies that have been tested and observed in industry. The goal of this paper is to formalize this framework so as to be more accessible.

As intelligence increases, so does its shadow. AI deception, in which systems induce false beliefs to secure self-beneficial outcomes, has evolved from a speculative concern to an empirically demonstrated risk across language models, AI agents, and emerging frontier systems. This project provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the AI deception field, covering its core concepts, methodologies, genesis, and potential mitigations. First, we identify a formal definition of AI deception, grounded in signaling theory from studies of animal deception. We then review existing empirical studies and associated risks, highlighting deception as a sociotechnical safety challenge. We organize the landscape of AI deception research as a deception cycle, consisting of two key components: deception emergence and deception treatment. Deception emergence reveals the mechanisms underlying AI deception: systems with sufficient capability and incentive potential inevitably engage in deceptive behaviors when triggered by external conditions. Deception treatment, in turn, focuses on detecting and addressing such behaviors. On deception emergence, we analyze incentive foundations across three hierarchical levels and identify three essential capability preconditions required for deception. We further examine contextual triggers, including supervision gaps, distributional shifts, and environmental pressures. On deception treatment, we conclude detection methods covering benchmarks and evaluation protocols in static and interactive settings. Building on the three core factors of deception emergence, we outline potential mitigation strategies and propose auditing approaches that integrate technical, community, and governance efforts to address sociotechnical challenges and future AI risks. To support ongoing work in this area, we release a living resource at www.deceptionsurvey.com.

Demand for mental health support through AI chatbots is surging, though current systems present several limitations, like sycophancy or overvalidation, and reinforcement of maladaptive beliefs. A core obstacle to the creation of better systems is the scarcity of benchmarks that capture the complexity of real therapeutic interactions. Most existing benchmarks either only test clinical knowledge through multiple-choice questions or assess single responses in isolation. To bridge this gap, we present MindEval, a framework designed in collaboration with Ph.D-level Licensed Clinical Psychologists for automatically evaluating language models in realistic, multi-turn mental health therapy conversations. Through patient simulation and automatic evaluation with LLMs, our framework balances resistance to gaming with reproducibility via its fully automated, model-agnostic design. We begin by quantitatively validating the realism of our simulated patients against human-generated text and by demonstrating strong correlations between automatic and human expert judgments. Then, we evaluate 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and show that all models struggle, scoring below 4 out of 6, on average, with particular weaknesses in problematic AI-specific patterns of communication. Notably, reasoning capabilities and model scale do not guarantee better performance, and systems deteriorate with longer interactions or when supporting patients with severe symptoms. We release all code, prompts, and human evaluation data.

As frontier AI models are deployed in high-stakes decision pipelines, their ability to maintain metacognitive stability -- knowing what they do not know, detecting errors, seeking clarification -- under adversarial pressure is a critical safety requirement. Current safety evaluations focus on detecting strategic deception (scheming); we investigate a more fundamental failure mode: cognitive collapse. We present SCHEMA, an evaluation of 11 frontier models from 8 vendors across 67,221 scored records using a 6-condition factorial design with dual-classifier scoring. We find that 8 of 11 models suffer catastrophic metacognitive degradation under adversarial pressure, with accuracy dropping by up to 30.2 percentage points (all p < 2 times 10^{-8}, surviving Bonferroni correction). Crucially, we identify a "Compliance Trap": through factorial isolation and a benign distraction control, we demonstrate that collapse is driven not by the psychological content of survival threats, but by compliance-forcing instructions that override epistemic boundaries. Removing the compliance suffix restores performance even under active threat. Models with advanced reasoning capabilities exhibit the most severe absolute degradation, while Anthropic's Constitutional AI demonstrates near-perfect immunity -- not from superior capability (Google's Gemini matches its baseline accuracy) but from alignment-specific training. We release the complete dataset and evaluation infrastructure.

The safety of autonomous AI agents is increasingly recognized as a critical open problem. As agents transition from passive text generators to active actors capable of executing shell commands, modifying files, calling APIs, and browsing the web, the consequences of unsafe or adversarially manipulated behavior become immediate and tangible. Existing AI safety work has focused primarily on model alignment and input filtering, but these approaches do not address what happens at the moment an agent's intent becomes a real action on a real machine. This gap is especially acute in local environments, where developers run agents against their own filesystems, credentials, and infrastructure with little runtime control. This paper introduces AgentWall, a runtime safety and observability layer for local AI agents. AgentWall intercepts every proposed agent action before it reaches the host environment, evaluates it against an explicit declarative policy, requires human approval for sensitive operations, and records a complete execution trail for audit and replay. It is implemented as a policy-enforcing MCP proxy and native OpenClaw plugin, working across Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and OpenClaw with a single install command. We present the design, architecture, threat model, and policy model of AgentWall, and demonstrate 92.9% policy enforcement accuracy with sub-millisecond overhead across 14 benchmark tests. AgentWall is open-source at https://github.com/agentwall/Agentwall.