How Brittle is Agent Safety? Rethinking Agent Risk under Intent Concealment and Task Complexity

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08487v1
• Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:01:17 GMT
• Title: How Brittle is Agent Safety? Rethinking Agent Risk under Intent Concealment and Task Complexity
• Authors: Zihan Ma, Dongsheng Zhu, Shudong Liu, Taolin Zhang, Junnan Liu, Qingqiu Li, Minnan Luo, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen,
• Abstract summary: Current safety evaluations for LLM-driven agents primarily focus on atomic harms, failing to address sophisticated threats where malicious intent is concealed or diluted within complex tasks.<n>We address this gap with a two-dimensional analysis of agent safety brittleness under the pressures of intent concealment and task complexity.<n>Our findings reveal two critical phenomena: safety alignment degrades sharply and predictably as intent becomes obscured, and a "Complexity Paradox" emerges, where agents seem safer on harder tasks only due to capability limitations.
• Score: 55.441602598245744
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Current safety evaluations for LLM-driven agents primarily focus on atomic harms, failing to address sophisticated threats where malicious intent is concealed or diluted within complex tasks. We address this gap with a two-dimensional analysis of agent safety brittleness under the orthogonal pressures of intent concealment and task complexity. To enable this, we introduce OASIS (Orthogonal Agent Safety Inquiry Suite), a hierarchical benchmark with fine-grained annotations and a high-fidelity simulation sandbox. Our findings reveal two critical phenomena: safety alignment degrades sharply and predictably as intent becomes obscured, and a "Complexity Paradox" emerges, where agents seem safer on harder tasks only due to capability limitations. By releasing OASIS and its simulation environment, we provide a principled foundation for probing and strengthening agent safety in these overlooked dimensions.

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