SREGym: A Live Benchmark for AI SRE Agents with High-Fidelity Failure Scenarios

AI agents deployed into SRE workflows currently derive their understanding of environment state from raw observability telemetry at query time, paying a semantic-interpretation tax in tokens, latency, and inferential reliability. We propose Causely, a causal intelligence layer that maintains a structured representation of environment topology, attribute dependencies, and causal relationships that are anchroed to a ontological representation of the managed environment. Causely transforms raw telemetry into a live, queryable model providing the semantic and causal foundation AI agents require to diagnose, evaluate impact, and act safely in production. We evaluate this value proposition through a benchmark study conducted in a controlled setting with injected faults in a 24-microservice OpenTelemetry demo application. Our experiments compare four agent configurations (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, HolmesGPT with Sonnet and Gemini backends). Experiments are run with and without access to Causely under two scenarios: an active incident and a healthy baseline. On the active-fault scenario, causal grounding reduces mean time-to-diagnosis by 63%, mean token consumption by 60%, and mean tool-call count by 78%, compressing the investigation footprint by 4.8$\times$ and lowering direct API cost per run by 57%; root-cause-diagnosis accuracy rises from 75% to 100%.

AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy tool outputs. We address this gap by manually annotating failed agent runs and release a novel benchmark of 170 trajectories across 11 diverse task settings, including structured API workflows, incident management, and open-ended web/file tasks. Each trajectory is annotated with a critical failure step and a category from a grounded-theory derived, cross-domain failure taxonomy. To mitigate the human cost of failure attribution, we present AgentRx, an $\textit{automated diagnostic framework}$ that pinpoints the critical failure step in a failed agent trajectory. It synthesizes constraints, evaluates them step-by-step, and produces an auditable validation log of constraint violations with associated evidence; an LLM-based judge uses this log to localize the critical step and category. AgentRx improves step localization by 75% on average over prior work, while providing failure category attribution.

AI agents are rapidly improving in cybersecurity capabilities when the source code is available for analysis, yet much of the software most consequential to cybersecurity, including malware, firmware, and proprietary applications, is available only as binaries. Analyzing such software requires reverse engineering(RE): recovering program semantics before the analysis can be meaningfully performed. However, evaluating agentic RE poses a fundamental challenge: benchmark instances must be unseen as source code in the LLMs' training data to prevent models from taking shortcuts by recognizing them rather than really analyzing them, while also matching the scale and anti-analysis protections of real software. Unfortunately, however, existing benchmarks do not jointly satisfy these requirements. To this end, we introduce SRE-Bench, the first realistic, contamination-free RE benchmark. Built entirely from scratch by RE experts with over 5,000 hours, SRE-Bench comprises 19 private, real-world-scale programs averaging 16.9K lines of code. We further developed 44 in-house anti-analysis primitives, yielding 262 binary instances and 1572 deterministically graded tasks. Our evaluation across five frontier LLMs (GPT-5.6-sol,Claude-Opus-5,GPT-5.5,Grok-4.5, and GLM-5.2) shows that RE remains largely unsolved: the strongest model, GPT-5.6-sol, scores 61.4% per instance, and fully solves only 31.5% of the instances. Our analysis further reveals that agents behave differently from human engineers, where agents are relatively insensitive to compiler optimization and static linking. Controlled ablations also confirm that both contamination control and realistic scale are essential. These results indicate that strong source-code security capabilities do not yet transfer to binary analysis, highlighting RE as an important frontier for agentic cybersecurity and SRE-Bench as a rigorous testbed to measure progress.