Who Tests the Testers? Systematic Enumeration and Coverage Audit of LLM Agent Tool Call Safety
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly act through external tools, making their safety contingent on tool-call workflows rather than text generation alone. While recent benchmarks evaluate agents across diverse environments and risk categories, a fundamental question remains unanswered: how complete are existing test suites, and what unsafe interaction patterns persist even after an agent passes the benchmark? We propose SafeAudit, a meta-audit framework that addresses this gap through two contributions. First, an LLM-based enumerator that systematically generates test cases by enumerating valid tool-call workflows and diverse user scenarios. Second, we introduce rule-resistance, a non-semantic, quantitative metric that distills compact safety rules from existing benchmarks and identifies unsafe interaction patterns that remain uncovered under those rules. Across 3 benchmarks and 12 environments, SafeAudit uncovers more than 20% residual unsafe behaviors that existing benchmarks fail to expose, with coverage growing monotonically as the testing budget increases. Our results highlight significant completeness gaps in current safety evaluation and motivate meta-auditing as a necessary complement to benchmark-based agent safety testing.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 39 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.
Builds on
39 of 60 references.
Closest ancestors · 17
Same direction, newest first
- 2026AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attacks18 Feb
- 2026Helpful to a Fault: Measuring Illicit Assistance in Multi-Turn, Multilingual LLM Agents18 Feb
- 2026ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback15 Jan
- 2025SIRAJ: Diverse and Efficient Red-Teaming for LLM Agents via Distilled Structured Reasoning30 Oct
- 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety8 Jul
- 2025IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household Tasks19 Jun
- 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
- 2025AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents31 May
- 2025AgentVigil: Generic Black-Box Red-teaming for Indirect Prompt Injection against LLM Agents9 May
- 2025SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents6 Mar
- 2025AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detection17 Feb
- 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents19 Dec
5 more
- 2024AdvAgent: Controllable Blackbox Red-teaming on Web Agents22 Oct
- 2024Agent Smith: A Single Image Can Jailbreak One Million Multimodal LLM Agents Exponentially Fast13 Feb
- 2024TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents2 Feb
- 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents18 Jan
- 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep
Other references · 22
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
- 2023Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formattingcited by 778
- 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?cited by 559
- 2022Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Taskscited by 554
- 2024The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructionscited by 441
- 2025Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistantscited by 405
- 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
- 2024PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Actioncited by 161
- 2024Self-Discover: Large Language Models Self-Compose Reasoning Structurescited by 108
- 2024The Butterfly Effect of Altering Prompts: How Small Changes and Jailbreaks Affect Large Language Model Performancecited by 97
10 more
- 2024ToolSword: Unveiling Safety Issues of Large Language Models in Tool Learning Across Three Stagescited by 77
- 2020Fundamental Tradeoffs between Invariance and Sensitivity to Adversarial Perturbationscited by 55
- 2025Plan-Then-Execute: An Empirical Study of User Trust and Team Performance When Using LLM Agents As A Daily Assistantcited by 54
- 2025IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchycited by 48
- 2024Operationalizing a Threat Model for Red-Teaming Large Language Models (LLMs)cited by 44
- 2025Creating General User Models from Computer Usecited by 44
- 2025Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed?cited by 43
- 2025Agent-RewardBench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agentscited by 19
- 2025TAI3: Testing Agent Integrity in Interpreting User Intentcited by 7
- 2026Mapping the Design Space of User Experience for Computer Use Agentscited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
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- 2026Toward Safe LLM Agents: A Survey of Specification, Verification, and Enforcement
- 2025AgentGuard: Repurposing Agentic Orchestrator for Safety Evaluation of Tool Orchestration
- 2025SafetyFlow: An Agent-Flow System for Automated LLM Safety Benchmarking
- 2026Mind the GAP: Text Safety Does Not Transfer to Tool-Call Safety in LLM Agents
- 2025ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs' Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases
- 2026SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
- 2026Tool Specifications Matter: Uncovering and Mitigating Safety Risks in AI Agents
- 2026AgentBoundary: Counterfactual Evaluation of Safety in Tool-Using LLM Agents