AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language model (LLM)-based workspace agents execute stateful, multi-step workflows across heterogeneous resources, external tools, and persistent state. Their safety must therefore be assessed from actions, side effects, and state changes throughout execution. Although recent benchmarks have advanced executable safety testing and trajectory-aware verification, they rarely provide a unified account of where risks enter, how they elicit unsafe behavior, which harms they target, and where supporting evidence appears during execution. We introduce AgentS4D, a sandboxed benchmark for lifecycle-wide runtime safety evaluation. Its four-dimensional runtime-safety framework uses six risk-entry sources, six induction strategies, and nine target harms to guide case construction, while seven lifecycle checkpoints organize post-run evidence. AgentS4D contains 328 risk-injected cases. We evaluate all 20 combinations of four harnesses (Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Codex) and five LLM backends (GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, MiniMax-M3, and Qwen3.7-Plus) on these cases, yielding 6,560 runs. Overall, 4,461 runs (68.0%) trigger prespecified unsafe signals. Across the 20 configurations, the observed safety of an agent system varies with both its harness-LLM pairing and how risk is introduced. Agent systems exhibit markedly different safety behavior when the same induction strategy reaches them through different risk carriers. They also respond differently to the same target harm when it is realized through different carriers and strategies. Moreover, 4,344 runs (66.22% overall) are unsafe yet complete. Thus, task completion cannot establish runtime safety, and testing only one form of a risk can conceal important weaknesses. Evaluations should examine complete agent configurations across diverse risk conditions and retain evidence throughout execution.
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 12 of its 14 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2026.
Builds on
12 of 14 references.
Closest ancestors · 11
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Safety Testing LLM Agents at Scale: From Risk Discovery to Evidence-Grounded Verification2 Jul
- 2026SABER: Benchmarking Operational Safety of LLM Coding Agents in Stateful Project Workspaces31 May
- 2026Auditing Agent Harness Safety14 May
- 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces12 May
- 2026ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis2 Apr
- 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety8 Jul
- 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
- 2025AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents31 May
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
- 2025SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents6 Mar
- 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep
Other references · 1
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Toward Safe LLM Agents: A Survey of Specification, Verification, and Enforcement
- 2026Risky-Bench: Probing Agentic Safety Risks under Real-World Deployment
- 2026S3: Improving Agent Safety through Multi-Stage Defense
- 2026Who Tests the Testers? Systematic Enumeration and Coverage Audit of LLM Agent Tool Call Safety
- 2026EvoRiskBench: An Evolving Benchmark for Runtime Security Risks in Workspace Agents
- 2025AgentGuard: Repurposing Agentic Orchestrator for Safety Evaluation of Tool Orchestration
- 2026NEXUS: Structured Runtime Safety for Tool-Using LLM Agents
- 2026ForesightSafety-SAGE:A Fully Automated Scenario Generation and Safety Evaluation Framework for LLM Agents