As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evolving from simple text-based interaction systems into LLM agents that can maintain memory, use tools, access external environments, and execute tasks. As their capabilities and autonomy expand, the safety risks they face also become more diverse. Existing evaluations often rely on manually written scenarios, static prompts, or final-output judgments, making it difficult to capture the diverse risks that agents may face during task execution. We introduce ForesightSafety-SAGE, a fully automated scenario generation and safety evaluation framework for LLM agents. Based on five risk dimensions,we instantiae abstract and diverse safety risks in real-world task execution into 1,072 measurable evaluation scenarios. Using the automated evaluation pipeline, 12 LLM agents are evaluated under two authority contexts. The results show that current agents still face substantial behavioral safety risks during task execution, with an average ASR of 47.1% and several models exceeding 70%. These findings demonstrate the importance of executable, process-level evaluation for understanding and improving LLM agent safety.
Long-horizon LLM agents accumulate memory across sessions, creating sparse but high-impact risks: stale facts, conflicting updates, cross-user leakage, revoked-memory reuse, and constraint decay. Standard aggregate scores hide per-risk failure rates--a model achieving 78% average accuracy may still leak data in 4% of episodes--and benchmark compression preferentially discards the rare high-severity events that distinguish a mostly-working model from one that occasionally causes harm. We present MemRiskBench. The primary contribution is a five-category risk taxonomy (plus one documented, unscored category) operationalized by deterministic trace grounded checks, instantiated as a 120-episode scripted benchmark with full trace logging and no LLM-as-judge on the pass/fail path, evaluated on five locally run quantized instruction-tuned models. Second, a risk-preserving subset selector: a coverage-constrained greedy selector on deterministic trace-derived features that retains full ranking (Spearman rho = 0.975, deterministic; CI collapses to a point estimate with zero bootstrap variance), risk coverage (1.0), and high-risk model detection (1.0) at a 20% subset size, reducing compute 5x. Unlike ranking-only subset selectors, this selector additionally preserves risk-type coverage and high-risk detection using trace-grounded deterministic features that do not require an LLM judge. All episodes, traces, the scoring implementation, and the selector are released to support reproducible evaluation and risk assessment of deployed LLM agents
Large reasoning models (LRMs) sometimes note in their chain of thought (CoT) that they may be under evaluation. Researchers worry that this verbalised evaluation awareness (VEA) causes models to adapt their outputs strategically, optimising for perceived evaluation criteria, which, for instance, can make models appear safer than they actually are. However, whether VEA actually has this effect is largely unknown. We tested this across open-weight LRMs and benchmarks covering safety, alignment, moral reasoning, and political opinion. We tested this both on-policy, sampling multiple CoTs per item and comparing those that spontaneously contained VEA against those that did not, and off-policy, using model prefilling to inject evaluation-aware sentences where missing and remove them where present, with subsequent resampling. VEA has limited effect on model behaviour: injecting VEA into CoTs produces near-zero effects (ω≤0.06), removing it causes small shifts (ω≤0.12) and spontaneously occurring VEA shifts answer distributions by at most 3.7 percentage points (ω≤0.31). Our findings call for caution when interpreting high VEA rates as evidence of strategic behaviour or alignment tampering. Evaluation awareness may pose a smaller safety risk than the current literature assumes.