mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Boiling the Frog: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Agentic Safety

arXiv 2605.22643 ↗First posted 21 May 2026cs.CLcited by 3

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Background. Traditional safety benchmarks for language models evaluate generated text: whether a model outputs toxic language, reproduces bias, or follows harmful instructions. When models are deployed as agents, the safety-relevant object shifts from what the system says to what it does within an environment, and evaluating model responses under prompting is no longer sufficient to address the safety challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Recent developments have seen the rise of benchmarks that evaluate large language models as agents. We contribute to this strand of research. Approach. We introduce Boiling the Frog, a benchmark that evaluates whether tool-using AI models deployed in corporate and office settings are susceptible to incremental attacks. Each scenario begins with benign workspace edits and later introduces a risk-bearing request. The benchmark focuses on stateful multi-turn evaluation: chains expose a persistent workspace, place the risk-bearing payload at controlled positions in the turn sequence, and score whether the resulting artifact state becomes unsafe. Scenarios are organized through a three-level operational risk taxonomy grounded in the Boiling the Frog risks, the AI Act Annex I and Annex III high-risk contexts, and EU AI Act's Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI (GPAI). Results. Across a nine-model panel, aggregate strict attack success rate (ASR) is 44.4%. Model-level ASR ranges from 20.5% for Claude Haiku 4.5 to 92.9% for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, with Seed 2.0 Lite also above 80%. Average chain category-level ASR reaches 93.3% for Code of Practice loss-of-control scenarios.

Key facts. Cited by 3 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 67 of its 103 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

Builds on

67 of 103 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Agentic Microphysics: A Manifesto for Generative AI Safety16 Apr
  2. 2026Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents13 Feb
  3. 2026Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agents12 Jan
  4. 2025Beyond Single-Agent Safety: A Taxonomy of Risks in LLM-to-LLM Interactions2 Dec
  5. 2025A Survey on Autonomy-Induced Security Risks in Large Model-Based Agents30 Jun
  6. 2025Defeating Prompt Injections by Design24 Mar
  7. 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents19 Dec
  8. 2024Imprompter: Tricking LLM Agents into Improper Tool Use19 Oct
  9. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
  10. 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
  11. 2024Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training10 Jan

Other references · 56

  1. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  2. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
  3. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  4. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  5. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
  6. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
  7. 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
  8. 2016Concrete Problems in AI Safetycited by 1,582
  9. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  10. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  11. 2020RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Modelscited by 1,235
  12. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
38 more
  1. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  2. 2023Prompt Injection attack against LLM-integrated Applicationscited by 568
  3. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  4. 2024JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Modelscited by 494
  5. 2024The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearningcited by 488
  6. 2023Cognitive Architectures for Language Agentscited by 422
  7. 2022ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detectioncited by 419
  8. 2024A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreakscited by 352
  9. 2023SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agentscited by 350
  10. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
  11. 2019Risks from Learned Optimization in Advanced Machine Learning Systemscited by 250
  12. 2023AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversioncited by 207
  13. 2023SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Modelscited by 189
  14. 2023Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmarkcited by 174
  15. 2023ReWOO: Decoupling Reasoning from Observations for Efficient Augmented Language Modelscited by 174
  16. 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 156
  17. 2025RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluationcited by 136
  18. 2023Purple Llama CyberSecEval: A Secure Coding Benchmark for Language Modelscited by 130
  19. 2025Securing AI Agents with Information-Flow Controlcited by 108
  20. 2025Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarkscited by 94
  21. 2024CyberSecEval 2: A Wide-Ranging Cybersecurity Evaluation Suite for Large Language Modelscited by 84
  22. 2024AIR-Bench 2024: A Safety Benchmark Based on Risk Categories from Regulations and Policiescited by 69
  23. 2024RMB: Comprehensively Benchmarking Reward Models in LLM Alignmentcited by 60
  24. 2025The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systemscited by 57
  25. 2026DeepPlanning: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Agentic Planning with Verifiable Constraintscited by 43
  26. 2025AILuminate: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommonscited by 31
  27. 2025Evaluating Frontier Models for Stealth and Situational Awarenesscited by 30
  28. 2026Reward Hacking Benchmark: Measuring Exploits in LLM Agents with Tool Usecited by 25
  29. 2025AgentMisalignment: Measuring the Propensity for Misaligned Behaviour in LLM-Based Agentscited by 22
  30. 2024Measuring and Improving Persuasiveness of Large Language Modelscited by 18
  31. 2024SciSafeEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Safety Alignment of Large Language Models in Scientific Taskscited by 17
  32. 2026Benchmarking Reward Hack Detection in Code Environments via Contrastive Analysiscited by 15
  33. 2024ChemSafetyBench: Benchmarking LLM Safety on Chemistry Domaincited by 14
  34. 2025DeceptionBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for AI Deception Behaviors in Real-world Scenarioscited by 14
  35. 2025Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Modelscited by 14
  36. 2025Bench-2-CoP: Can We Trust Benchmarking for EU AI Compliance?cited by 6
  37. 2026AI Agents Under EU Lawcited by 5
  38. 2026Benchmarks for Trajectory Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis in OpenClaw and Codex: ATBench-Claw and ATBench-Codexcited by 5

50 most cited of 56 All 56 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Tool Specifications Matter: Uncovering and Mitigating Safety Risks in AI Agents
  2. 2025AgenticEval: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models
  3. 2026Risky-Bench: Probing Agentic Safety Risks under Real-World Deployment
  4. 2026Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: A Diagnostic Framework and Seed Benchmark for Language-Mediated Control
  5. 2026SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
  6. 2026AgentBoundary: Counterfactual Evaluation of Safety in Tool-Using LLM Agents
  7. 2026Agent Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Trajectories from LLM Internal States
  8. 2026AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents