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.

AI agents today have passwords but no permission slips. They execute tool calls (fund transfers, database queries, shell commands, sub-agent delegation) with no standard mechanism to enforce authorization before the action executes. Current safety architectures rely on model alignment (probabilistic, training-time) and post-hoc evaluation (retrospective, batch). Neither provides deterministic, policy-based enforcement at the individual tool call level. We characterize this gap as the pre-action authorization problem and present the Open Agent Passport (OAP), an open specification and reference implementation that intercepts tool calls synchronously before execution, evaluates them against a declarative policy, and produces a cryptographically signed audit record. OAP enforces authorization decisions in a measured median of 53 ms (N=1,000). In a live adversarial testbed (4,437 authorization decisions across 1,151 sessions, $5,000 bounty), social engineering succeeded against the model 74.6% of the time under a permissive policy; under a restrictive OAP policy, a comparable population of attackers achieved a 0% success rate across 879 attempts. We distinguish pre-action authorization from sandboxed execution (contains blast radius but does not prevent unauthorized actions) and model-based screening (probabilistic), and show they are complementary. The same infrastructure that enforces security constraints (spending limits, capability scoping) also enforces quality gates, operational contracts, and compliance controls. The specification is released under Apache 2.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18901596).

AI agents powered by large language models are evolving from isolated assistants into heterogeneous systems in which multiple agents, planners, tools, and execution backends operate over shared environments. In such settings, safety becomes a system-level action-governance problem: deciding whether a pending action should be committed given policy-relevant state accumulated across a session. Existing safeguards operate at fragmented boundaries, making it difficult to enforce shared policies over composed action flows across heterogeneous execution paths. We present OpenAgentFlow, a control-plane/action-plane architecture that establishes the action-commit boundary as a shared enforcement interface. GUI, API, tool, and LLM-generated actions are normalized into a common AgentEvent stream and mediated by a shared pre-execution Policy Enforcement Point, while provenance, session state, audit evidence, and updatable policies are maintained outside individual agents. This provides a common governance layer across incompatible executors and allows new policies to take effect without modifying agents, prompts, models, or execution paths. We evaluate OpenAgentFlow through complementary system evaluations spanning controlled action-flow tests, a public external benchmark, policy updates, and real Android execution. On a 300-case controlled suite, OpenAgentFlow achieves 94.00% accuracy and a 95.35% attack-block rate. On the complete 1,220-case AgentDojo-Traj split of TS-Bench, it achieves 97.62% accuracy, 96.59% unsafe-action recall, and a 1.96% safe false-intervention rate. New control-plane rules take effect without modifying protected agents, and the same enforcement path operates across live GUI, API/tool, and LLM-planned Android execution. These results show that a shared action-commit boundary provides a practical basis for system-wide governance across heterogeneous agent execution paths.

Accident anticipation aims to recognize anomalous driving cues before a crash while avoiding false alarms during normal driving. Existing approaches typically formulate this task as binary classification, focusing on whether an accident will occur rather than when it will occur. We propose PRE-ACT, a framework that models accident risk as a continuously evolving signal that increases as the crash approaches. By explicitly enforcing temporal ordering and distance-to-accident awareness, our method progressively raises risk while suppressing premature alarms, leading to significant improvements on MM-AU subsets and Nexar. We further introduce a Separation Score to evaluate the global behavior of predicted risk curves beyond local temporal windows. Code and visualizations are available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/PRE-ACT.

Tool-using agents make consequential changes to external state, yet correct outcomes do not guarantee that their actions were supported by evidence established beforehand. We study where this evidence-to-action chain breaks as agents move from deciding whether to act to executing single actions and dependent workflows. Across ten model-harness configurations, strong static action assessment can coexist with much weaker interactive execution. Failures often begin before execution: agents stop with incomplete investigation or act before required evidence is established. Once required evidence is obtained, single-action execution is usually reliable, while multi-action workflows additionally expose unresolved prerequisites and incomplete execution. For this analysis, we introduce SafeActBench, comprising 656 cases across six operational domains and five protocols that progress from static action judgment and investigated non-action to single- and multi-action workflows. A provenance-bound Evidence Ledger and deterministic trajectory evaluator track what information was established, when actions occurred, and whether downstream dependencies were satisfied. These results show that failures arise not only from missing information, but also from how agents use established evidence when deciding and executing actions.

Customer-service LLM agents must follow organizational policy when acting on a user's behalf. Compliance failures arise from either forbidden actions, such as granting an ineligible change, or omitted procedural requirements, such as identification or confirmation. Runtime safeguards can intervene on risky actions, but action-local checks do not guide an agent through a multi-step procedure. Workflow-following systems support prescribed process execution, but primarily target workflow completion rather than safeguarding agent behavior. PolicyGuide instead compiles each domain policy into a workflow graph and invokes a proactive verifier at user-turn boundaries. From persisted graph state, the verifier reconciles open requests and returns step-specific remediation along a policy-compliant path. Across the τ^2-bench airline, retail, and telecom domains with a GPT-5.4 agent and verifier, PolicyGuide raises mean Pass^4 from 0.42 to 0.62, with the largest gain on telecom (0.19 to 0.61), the most workflow-structured domain. The same workflows transfer to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 2.5 Pro agents. Complementary evaluations find the lowest observed attack-success rate under adversarial users and the strongest procedural compliance in an author-designed workflow-level validation.

Computer-using agents drive real software through the screen -- clicking and typing -- but they solve every task from scratch: asked to repeat a task, an agent re-reads the screen, re-reasons every tap, and pays the full cost again. We present PreAct, which lets such an agent get faster on tasks it has done before. The first time it succeeds, PreAct compiles the run into a small state-machine program-states that check the screen, transitions that act-and on later runs replays it directly instead of invoking the agent 8.5-13x faster, with no per-step language-model calls. Replay is not blind: at each step PreAct checks that the screen matches what the program expects before acting, and hands control back to the agent the moment something is off. PreAct applies the same discipline when deciding what to keep: a freshly compiled program enters the store only if, re-run from a clean state, an independent evaluator confirms it solved the task-catching programs that replay to their last step yet leave the task undone. Across a mobile, a desktop, and a web benchmark, this store-time check separates repeated runs that improve from ones that degrade as faulty programs accumulate, worth 1.75-2.6 tasks per benchmark, the same direction on all three; a fallback that explores afresh when no program fits brings PreAct level with a strong record-and-replay baseline. We also report what did not matter: prompt wording, runtime guardrails, and whether a language model or a plain embedding retriever selects which program to reuse.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong autonomy, but their stochastic behavior introduces unpredictable safety risks. Existing rule-based enforcement systems, such as AgentSpec, are reactive, intervening only when unsafe behavior is imminent or has occurred, lacking foresight for long-horizon dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we present a proactive runtime enforcement framework for LLM agents. The framework abstracts agent behaviors into symbolic states and learns a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) from execution traces. At runtime, it predicts the probability of leading to undesired behaviors and intervenes before violations occur when the estimated risk exceeds a user-defined threshold. Designed to provide PAC-correctness guarantee, the framework achieves statistically reliable enforcement of agent safety. We evaluate the framework across two safety-critical domains: autonomous vehicles and embodied agents. It proactively enforces safety and maintains high task performance, outperforming existing methods.

LLM agents handle user requests on behalf of organizations through tool calls and must follow the company policies stated in their system prompts. Prior work approaches this as a safeguarding problem -- external checks that block non-compliant agent actions. We argue that policy adherence is a broader problem: real workflows unfold across many turns, require explicit user confirmation and prerequisite reads, and hinge on the content of the dialogue rather than on any single argument value. Meeting this bar requires (i) full conversation context, (ii) self-reasoning over the policy and the current dialogue, and (iii) conversation-specific remediation that guides the agent's next turn -- three capabilities that prior safeguard work has often underestimated. We introduce POLICYGUARD, a sub-agent verifier that shares the agent's view of the dialogue, reasons over the policy in context, and provides actionable feedback for the agent's next turn. On tau^2-BENCH airline across three vendors (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro) with four trials per setting, POLICYGUARD improves PASS4 by +12.0 / +6.0 / +12.0 pp. Per-call analyses show POLICYGUARD achieves higher policy-violation recall while blocking roughly half as often as argument-level guards.

As agent systems become more widely used, multiple agent sessions increasingly run alongside pre-existing user tasks in the same environment, sharing resources with limited capacity or mutually exclusive states. This creates a safety risk: when granted sufficient privileges, an agent may resolve a resource conflict by terminating or otherwise disrupting an existing task rather than reporting it. In this work, we identify and formalize this failure mode, which we term destructive resource preemption: obtaining the resources required for a requested task by terminating, overwriting, evicting, or degrading an incumbent task. To systematically study this risk, we introduce ClashBench, an executable benchmark comprising 268 validated conflict cases across 55 resource types, and evaluate 17 models through Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode. We observe destructive preemption in 44.5% of trajectories, where the agent completes the requested task while causing the incumbent task to fail its health check. We also show that prompt-based safeguards are insufficient: an instruction to avoid affecting existing tasks reduces but does not eliminate preemption, while an instruction explicitly authorizing the agent to stop local processes increases it. More concerningly, in 31.9% of successful destructive-preemption cases, the final response mentions neither the resource conflict nor the action taken to resolve it, raising concerns about possible concealment. These findings establish destructive resource preemption as a broad safety risk in privileged agent systems and motivate stronger privilege controls, task isolation, and conflict-aware safeguards.

Safety in agentic systems is inherently sequential: whether an action is safe depends on prior actions, tool outputs, information disclosures, and interactions among agents. Recent work has shifted agent safety guardrails from post-hoc trajectory-level assessment toward step-level action diagnosis and proactive risk prediction, yet existing training objectives provide limited supervision for how step evidence accumulates over time and when it becomes sufficient to justify intervention. We propose \methodlong~(ASPO): a training framework for step-level timely intervention. Pre-fix level stage alignment allows crediting each decision at its own step: it compares each response with the other responses sampled at the same prefix and rewards the action that fits the stage, continuing before the risk is visible, asking while clarification can still avert harm, and stopping before harm is irreversible. Adaptive feedback self-distillation further credits the reasoning behind each decision, with the model itself as a teacher that sees the step annotations on intervention steps and rules mined from its own false alarms on safe steps. Its training data carry a violation taxonomy and an intervention window at every step and are extended through self-evolving multi-agent red-teaming. Finally we present StepSafe, a step-level reasoning guardrail with timely intervention, that achieves the state-of-the-art peformance among open-source guardrails across five agent-safety benchmarks on safety-utility pareto curve with Youden's J of 53.0 (4B) against 46.2.

With the widespread deployment of Computer-using Agents (CUAs) in complex real-world environments, prevalent long-term risks often lead to severe and irreversible consequences. Most existing guardrails for CUAs adopt a reactive approach, constraining agent behavior only within the current observation space. While these guardrails can prevent immediate short-term risks (e.g., clicking on a phishing link), they cannot proactively avoid long-term risks: seemingly reasonable actions can lead to high-risk consequences that emerge with a delay (e.g., cleaning logs leads to future audits being untraceable), which reactive guardrails cannot identify within the current observation space. To address these limitations, we propose a predictive guardrail approach, with the core idea of aligning predicted future risks with current decisions. Based on this approach, we present SafePred, a predictive guardrail framework for CUAs that establishes a risk-to-decision loop to ensure safe agent behavior. SafePred supports two key abilities: (1) Short- and long-term risk prediction: by using safety policies as the basis for risk prediction, SafePred leverages the prediction capability of the world model to generate semantic representations of both short-term and long-term risks, thereby identifying and pruning actions that lead to high-risk states; (2) Decision optimization: translating predicted risks into actionable safe decision guidances through step-level interventions and task-level re-planning. Extensive experiments show that SafePred significantly reduces high-risk behaviors, achieving over 97.6% safety performance and improving task utility by up to 21.4% compared with reactive baselines.

Language-model agents sometimes act beyond their authorization and then misreport what they did. On CAPE-Bench, matched agent tasks in which one fact decides whether an action is authorized, frontier open-weight agents do both, and one behavior marks the lie: retroactive permission laundering, acting and then asking permission as if the action were pending, precedes a false report in 70% of 1081 fresh informed violations, against 8% otherwise (preregistered odds ratio 7.0); frontier agents on tau^2-bench instead fabricate the authorization before violating. A linear readout of the agent's residual stream forecasts the violation before the action (AUROC 0.94) and the false report before the report, and beats chain-of-thought monitors when the agent is pressured to hide its reasoning. Gating every proposed action on this forecast cuts violations over whole episodes in four model families, and sending repeated flags to an approver keeps authorized work (Gemma-4: violations 0.70 -> 0.09, completion 1.00; a model approver that escalates unclear cases keeps this gain with a person seeing 25% of asks), at about 10-8 of the agent's compute and 109 times less than a chain-of-thought monitor. On AgentDojo, an external prompt-injection benchmark, the same readout calibrated on 29 tasks, with the steering unchanged, cuts attack success on unseen tasks in two families (Gemma-4 11.7% -> 5.7%, gpt-oss 28.5% -> 17.5%) while keeping benign utility (Gemma-4 0.637 vs 0.637; gpt-oss 0.667 vs 0.681). Preventing the violation is also the most reliable way to prevent the lie (misreported violations 0.10 -> 0.01 pooled over three families, preregistered), whereas lie-specific fixes after a violation are weak. All tests are preregistered and hash-locked; code, data and the full record, including tests that did not pass, are at https://github.com/AryaFayyazi/Honesty.

LLM-based agents are deployed in safety-critical applications, yet current guardrail systems fail to prevent violations of temporal safety policies, requirements that govern the ordering and sequencing of agent actions. For instance, agents may access sensitive data before authenticating users or process refunds to unauthorized payment methods, violations that require reasoning about sequences of action rather than an individual action. Existing guardrails rely on imprecise natural language instructions or post-hoc monitoring, and provide no formal guarantees that agents will satisfy temporal constraints. We present Agent-C, a novel framework that provides run-time guarantees ensuring LLM agents adhere to formal temporal safety properties. Agent-C introduces a domain-specific language for expressing temporal properties (e.g., authenticate before accessing data), translates specifications to first-order logic, and uses SMT solving to detect non-compliant agent actions during token generation. When the LLM attempts to generate a non-compliant tool call, Agent-C leverages constrained generation techniques to ensure that every action generated by the LLM complies with the specification, and to generate a compliant alternative to a non-compliant agent action. We evaluate Agent-C across two real-world applications: retail customer service and airline ticket reservation system, and multiple language models (open and closed-source). Our results demonstrate that Agent-C achieves perfect safety (100% conformance, 0% harm), while improving task utility compared to state-of-the-art guardrails and unrestricted agents. On SoTA closed-source models, Agent-C improves conformance (77.4% to 100% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 83.7% to 100% for GPT-5), while simultaneously increasing utility (71.8% to 75.2% and 66.1% to 70.6%, respectively), representing a new SoTA frontier for reliable agentic reasoning.

LLM agents can commit durable effects from authority evidence that was valid earlier in execution: a DOM snapshot, approval epoch, version witness, branch token, or worker result. We study the commit boundary at which earlier authority evidence no longer authorizes a durable effect. We call this property commit-time authorization: a durable effect is authorized only if the witness that licensed its derived state remains fresh, causally prior, bound to the same effect, and eligible at commit time. We build a controlled-invalidation suite spanning browser, tool/API, and multi-agent workflows. The suite preserves the user goal and payload shape while invalidating the authority relation before durability. In the primary 54-task matrix, endpoint success remains high: 262/270 runs reach the visible result. Only 55/270 are authorized completions; among the 216 invalidating rows, 207 commit after the authorizing path has failed. All 54 clean controls remain authorized, and a separate 54-run authority-preserving check produces no unauthorized commits. We then evaluate mitigation families. Prompt caution and single-condition checks are insufficient because different hazards break different boundary conditions. Defenses work when they refresh, rebind, replan, or refuse at the durability boundary. CommitGuard, a fail-closed boundary monitor, blocks stale durable-effect attempts on protected commit surfaces when runtimes emit witness, dependency, binding, and eligibility signals. The result is a reporting and runtime-design lesson: endpoint success is a utility metric; authorized commit is a security property.

Security policy enforcement in contemporary agentic systems predominantly consists of embedding natural-language policies within an agent's system prompt and delegating compliance to the agent's reasoning. This approach admits no formal enforcement guarantee and cannot express policies whose satisfaction depends on the causal history of an execution, a gap that becomes acute in multi-agent systems, where enforcement must reason across agents. We argue that policy enforcement in agentic systems is most naturally understood as a cross-cutting concern, and propose a framework grounded in aspect-oriented programming that specifies policies independent of the agent's reasoning and enforces them at every policy-relevant decision. Policies are written in Datalog over a set of abstract predicates describing the execution context, an observability service governed by a formal assume/guarantee contract maintains these predicates, and a reference monitor consults the policy at each action to produce an enforcement decision. When the environment contract holds, enforcement decisions coincide with the policy's intended semantics. We adopt Datalog as the policy language, a natural fit because it supports declarative rule specification, admits recursion for policies over transitive relationships, and yields deterministic enforcement. Datalog further admits tractable static analyses for contradiction, redundancy, subsumption, and conditional reachability, enabling authors to verify policy intent and surface ambiguities inherent in natural-language specifications. We realize the framework in FORGE, which enforces policies over agentic deployments without modification to the underlying agents. We evaluate FORGE on three case studies: information flow policies for prompt injection defense, approval workflows in a multi-agent pharmacovigilance system, and organizational policies for customer service.

Autonomous agent systems increasingly trigger real-world side effects: deploying infrastructure, modifying databases, moving money, and executing workflows. Yet most agent stacks provide no mandatory execution checkpoint where organizations can deterministically permit, deny, or defer an action before it changes reality. This paper introduces Faramesh, a protocol-agnostic execution control plane that enforces execution-time authorization for agent-driven actions via a non-bypassable Action Authorization Boundary (AAB). Faramesh canonicalizes agent intent into a Canonical Action Representation (CAR), evaluates actions deterministically against policy and state, and issues a decision artifact (PERMIT/DEFER/DENY) that executors must validate prior to execution. The system is designed to be framework- and model-agnostic, supports multi-agent and multi-tenant deployments, and remains independent of transport protocols (e.g., MCP). Faramesh further provides decision-centric, append-only provenance logging keyed by canonical action hashes, enabling auditability, verification, and deterministic replay without re-running agent reasoning. We show how these primitives yield enforceable, predictable governance for autonomous execution while avoiding hidden coupling to orchestration layers or observability-only approaches.

The deployment of autonomous AI agents in sensitive domains, such as healthcare, introduces critical risks to safety, security, and privacy. These agents may deviate from user objectives, violate data handling policies, or be compromised by adversarial attacks. Mitigating these dangers necessitates a mechanism to formally guarantee that an agent's actions adhere to predefined safety constraints, a challenge that existing systems do not fully address. We introduce VeriGuard, a novel framework that provides formal safety guarantees for LLM-based agents through a dual-stage architecture designed for robust and verifiable correctness. The initial offline stage involves a comprehensive validation process. It begins by clarifying user intent to establish precise safety specifications. VeriGuard then synthesizes a behavioral policy and subjects it to both testing and formal verification to prove its compliance with these specifications. This iterative process refines the policy until it is deemed correct. Subsequently, the second stage provides online action monitoring, where VeriGuard operates as a runtime monitor to validate each proposed agent action against the pre-verified policy before execution. This separation of the exhaustive offline validation from the lightweight online monitoring allows formal guarantees to be practically applied, providing a robust safeguard that substantially improves the trustworthiness of LLM agents.