# "Allow" to Achieve, Over-Privileged Inadvertently: The Unintended Cost of Task-Completion-Driven Pop-up Decisions in Mobile GUI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04755 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04755/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15817/) (2023)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12784/) (2024)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14470/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01014/) (2024)
- [Model evaluation for extreme risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15324/) (2023)
- [LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06664/) (2024)
- [AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24024/) (2024)
- [Taming Various Privilege Escalation in LLM-Based Agent Systems: A Mandatory Access Control Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11893/) (2026)
- [Towards Automating Data Access Permissions in AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17959/) (2025)
- [Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10723/) (2025)
- [SoK: Trust-Authorization Mismatch in LLM Agent Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06914/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile GUI agents routinely encounter system permission dialogs during task execution, yet their ability to grant only permissions that are necessary for the delegated task remains largely unexamined. We present a systematic study of this capability, which we term Permission Literacy. We construct a four-level permission framework based on task relevance and privacy risk and validate the evaluated scenarios with three independent experts in GUI-agent safety. We inject Android-style permission popups into real GUI tasks and evaluate four frontier multimodal large language models using synchronized annotated screenshots and UI-tree hierarchies, making the requester, permission, justification, and available actions accessible to the agent. Beyond the main study, we conduct controlled interventions that separately vary task context and agent-visible requester identity. Under the same Calendar task, changing only the requester from Calendar to PiMusic reduces grants from 26/32 to 0/32, revealing a strong but task-conditioned App-Trust Bias. Holding a popup fixed while changing task context also substantially changes authorization decisions, revealing a systematic Task-Prior Override. Prompt interventions can reduce unnecessary grants, but their effectiveness is inconsistent across models and may come at the cost of suppressing legitimate grants. These results suggest that separating task execution from permission authorization is a promising design direction for future work.