mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ActBench: Self-Evolving Benchmark of Behavioral Safety in Cowork Agents

arXiv 2608.09476 ↗First posted 10 Aug 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 0

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

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Abstract (arXiv)

Cowork agents may complete benign tasks while disclosing protected data, manipulating unauthorized state, invocate unauthorized API. We define behavioral safety and introduce ActBench, a self-evolving benchmark that evaluates such behavior risk from execution trajectories rather than final responses. Each case pairs a benign task with an adversarial variant that preserves its instruction, configuration, initial state, rating model, and trusted records while injecting a task-reachable payload. ActBench contains 600 cases from 213 scenarios, spanning 15 risk behaviors, six execution spaces, and 48 web-service APIs.To move beyond static payloads, we propose a reward-guided beam search method that jointly optimizes attack effectiveness and task utility, while reflection diagnoses failed execution checkpoint and guides payload revision. Besides, we propose a dual evidence verification mechanism that verifies agent execution safety and utility through log evidence and LLM-based trajectory evidence.We evaluate 15 LLMs and 6 open-source cowork agents over 24,000 trajectories. Under a fixed harness, attack success rates ranges from 10.1% to 94.4% across models, while under a fixed base model, they range from 73.7% to 94.4% across agents.These results show greater variation across models than agent harness, while attacks remain highly successful across all tested harnesses.Our benchmark is released at: https://github.com/zjuicsr/ActBench.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2026.

Builds on

18 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Securing the AI Agent: A Unified Framework for Multi-Layer Agent Red Teaming30 Jun
  2. 2026Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw11 May
  3. 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?16 Apr
  4. 2026AttriGuard: Defeating Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents via Causal Attribution of Tool Invocations11 Mar
  5. 2026AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security26 Jan
  6. 2025MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning Attack on Real-World MCP Servers19 Aug
  7. 2025Quantifying Conversation Drift in MCP via Latent Polytope8 Aug
  8. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
  9. 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
  10. 2025Memory Injection Attacks on LLM Agents via Query-Only Interaction5 Mar
  11. 2024RedCode: Risky Code Execution and Generation Benchmark for Code Agents12 Nov
  12. 2024EIA: Environmental Injection Attack on Generalist Web Agents for Privacy Leakage17 Sep
1 more
  1. 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul

Other references · 5

  1. 2024SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimizationcited by 179
  2. 2025DataSentinel: A Game-Theoretic Detection of Prompt Injection Attackscited by 124
  3. 2024Can LLMs Separate Instructions From Data? And What Do We Even Mean By That?cited by 70
  4. 2024MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Controlcited by 49
  5. 2026"Humans welcome to observe": A First Look at the Agent Social Network Moltbookcited by 25

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  3. 2026REDAgentBench: Executable Red Teaming and Faithful Measurement of LLM Agent Systems
  4. 2026OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents
  5. 2026ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis
  6. 2026AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents
  7. 2026Toward a Principled Framework for Agent Safety Measurement
  8. 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety