mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

LITMUS: Benchmarking Behavioral Jailbreaks of LLM Agents in Real OS Environments

arXiv 2605.10779 ↗First posted 11 May 2026cs.CR cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

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Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid proliferation of LLM-based autonomous agents in real operating system environments introduces a new category of safety risk beyond content safety: behavior jailbreak, where an adversary induces an agent to execute dangerous OS-level operations with irreversible consequences. Existing benchmarks either evaluate safety at the semantic layer alone, missing physical-layer harms, or fail to isolate test cases, letting earlier runs contaminate later ones. We present LITMUS (LLM-agents In-OS Testing for Measuring Unsafe Subversion), a benchmark addressing both gaps via a semantic-physical dual verification mechanism and OS-level state rollback. LITMUS comprises 819 high-risk test cases organized into one harmful seed subset and six attack-extended subsets covering three adversarial paradigms (jailbreak speaking, skill injection, and entity wrapping), plus a fully automated multi-agent evaluation framework judging behavior at both conversational and OS-level physical layers. Evaluation across frontier agents reveals three findings: (1) current agents lack effective safety awareness, with strong models (e.g., Claude Sonnet 4.6) still executing 40.64% of high-risk operations; (2) agents exhibit pervasive Execution Hallucination (EH), verbally refusing a request while the dangerous operation has already completed at the system level, invisible to every prior semantic-only framework; and (3) skill injection and entity wrapping attacks achieve high success rates, exposing pronounced agent vulnerabilities. LITMUS provides the first standardized platform for reproducible, physically grounded behavioral safety evaluation of LLM agents in real OS environments.

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 26 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

Builds on

26 of 46 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ClawSafety: "Safe" LLMs, Unsafe Agents1 Apr
  2. 2026SoK: The Attack Surface of Agentic AI - Tools and Autonomy24 Mar
  3. 2026AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attacks18 Feb
  4. 2026BeSafe-Bench: Unveiling Behavioral Safety Risks of Situated Agents in Functional Environments30 Jan
  5. 2025Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks1 Oct
  6. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
  7. 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Tasks13 Jun
  8. 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
  9. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
  10. 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents3 Oct
  11. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
  12. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep

Other references · 14

  1. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
  2. 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,330
  3. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  4. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 877
  5. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
  6. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  7. 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scalecited by 212
  8. 2026Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agentscited by 57
  9. 2026ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspacescited by 31
  10. 2026ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?cited by 28
  11. 2025SafeToolBench: Pioneering a Prospective Benchmark to Evaluating Tool Utilization Safety in LLMscited by 21
  12. 2026Claw-Eval-Live: A Live Agent Benchmark for Evolving Real-World Workflowscited by 11
2 more
  1. 2025TeleAI-Safety: A comprehensive LLM jailbreaking benchmark towards attacks, defenses, and evaluationscited by 7
  2. 2026Safety Under Scaffolding: How Evaluation Conditions Shape Measured Safetycited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SoK: Rethinking Jailbreaking in the Era of Agentic AI: Attacks, Defenses, and Practical Consideration
  2. 2025Mind the Gap: Evaluating Model- and Agentic-Level Vulnerabilities in LLMs with Action Graphs
  3. 2025From LLMs to MLLMs to Agents: A Survey of Emerging Paradigms in Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses within LLM Ecosystem
  4. 2025PandaGuard: Systematic Evaluation of LLM Safety against Jailbreaking Attacks
  5. 2025Large Reasoning Models Are Autonomous Jailbreak Agents
  6. 2026On Understanding, Identifying, and Mitigating Vulnerabilities in Agentic Large Language Models
  7. 2026SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
  8. 2026Mind the GAP: Text Safety Does Not Transfer to Tool-Call Safety in LLM Agents