# JANUS: Foreseeing Latent Risk for Long-Horizon Agent Safety

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19913 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19913/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14470/) (2024)
- [AlignScore: Evaluating Factual Consistency with a Unified Alignment Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16739/) (2023)
- [Qwen3Guard Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14276/) (2025)
- [ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22738/) (2025)
- [Aegis2.0: A Diverse AI Safety Dataset and Risks Taxonomy for Alignment of LLM Guardrails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09004/) (2025)
- [LlamaFirewall: An open source guardrail system for building secure AI agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03574/) (2025)
- [AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00641/) (2025)
- [AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11448/) (2025)
- [ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10156/) (2026)
- [AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16901/) (2026)
- [Dive into Claude Code: The Design Space of Today's and Future AI Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14228/) (2026)
- [Building a Foundational Guardrail for General Agentic Systems via Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09781/) (2025)
- [From Assistant to Double Agent: Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks on OpenClaw for Personalized Local AI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08412/) (2026)
- [SafePred: A Predictive Guardrail for Computer-Using Agents via World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01725/) (2026)
- [LPS-Bench: Benchmarking Safety Awareness of Computer-Use Agents in Long-Horizon Planning under Benign and Adversarial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03255/) (2026)
- [AgentPack: A Dataset of Code Changes, Co-Authored by Agents and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21891/) (2025)
- [TabSieve: Explicit In-Table Evidence Selection for Tabular Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11700/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [StepGuard: Learning Step-Level Guardrails with Scalable Supervision and Safety-Utility Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24777/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agent safety is moving from content moderation toward preventing operational failures before tool-using agents act. We propose Janus, a foresight-oriented framework for long-horizon agent safety that trains guards to anticipate delayed risks from partial trajectories. Janus synthesizes diverse agent trajectories via multi-agent simulation and learns a shared policy with two coupled tasks: an anticipation task that forecasts safety-relevant futures and an adjudication task that decides safety from both the observed prefix and anticipated future. The two tasks are jointly optimized with CoAA-RL, which rewards forecasts by their utility for downstream safety judgment. The resulting guard model, Vanguard, blocks unsafe actions before execution. Across four agent-safety benchmarks, Vanguard improves average protection by 15.9 percentage points over baseline guards while increasing benign task completion by 5.1 percentage points.