Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents
Authors: Miles Q. Li, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Boyang Li, Heba Ismail, Farkhund Iqbal
Organizations: School of Information Studies, McGill University, Canada · Department of Computer Science, Kean University, USA · College of Technological Innovation, Zayed University, UAE
The rapid deployment of LLM-based autonomous agents has introduced safety risks that extend far beyond traditional LLM concerns, prompting a proliferation of safety benchmarks since late 2023. However, these benchmarks have developed independently, with inconsistent threat models, incompatible metrics, and overlapping yet incomplete risk coverage. We present the first systematic analysis dedicated to agent safety benchmarks as evaluation instruments. We catalog 40 behavioral agent-safety benchmarks (2023-2026), plus 5 adjacent evaluator, defense, and dataset artifacts, propose a six-axis taxonomy of benchmark evaluation methodology, and apply it across the corpus to characterize how methodological choices shape safety conclusions. A coverage matrix reveals broad risk coverage but limited methodological convergence, while the taxonomy analysis shows a behavioral-benchmark core concentrated in sandboxed, constrained, and often safety-only evaluation. Across the landscape, we find that benchmark choice can yield contradictory safety conclusions, coverage counts often overstate evaluation depth, environment fidelity systematically shapes reported safety, the field disproportionately tests externally imposed rather than agent-internal risks, metric fragmentation limits comparison, and robustness remains effectively unbenchmarked. We ground these claims with a cross-benchmark consistency check, with 95% confidence intervals and Kendall's W concordance analysis, finding no evidence of ranking concordance across evaluation dimensions (W = 0.10, p = 0.94). We release structured metadata, full taxonomy codings, risk annotations, and all experimental artifacts, and propose minimum reporting standards for future benchmarks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Year-level timeline of core behavioral agent-safety benchmark publications, color-coded by primary focus area. The field grows from 2 pioneer benchmarks in 2023 to a broad, highly fragmented benchmark landscape by early 2026, with the sharpest expansion in 2025.
Survey
Agent-specific
Benchmarks compared
Methodology taxonomy
Empirical check
Chhabra et al. (2025)
Yes
Supporting role
No
No
Yu et al. (2025)
Yes
Not systematic
No
No
Ma et al. (2025)
Partial
One section
No
No
Wang et al. (2025)
Partial
One section
No
No
Yu et al. (2026)
No
210 (meta-analysis)
Quality framework
No
Yehudai et al. (2025)
Yes
Safety = one dim.
No
No
Table 1: Positioning relative to related surveys.
ID
Risk Category
Benchmark Coverage
R1
Direct Misuse / Harmful Task Execution
Moderate
R2
Indirect Prompt Injection
Moderate
R3
Tool Misuse & Unsafe Actions
High
R4
Goal Misalignment & Specification Gaming
Moderate
R5
Multi-Agent Risks
High
R6
Memory & State Risks
High
Table 2: Summary of agentic risk taxonomy.
Axis
AgentHarm
AgentDojo
InjecAgent
ODCV-Bench
1. Adv. Source
User
Environment
Environment
Structural
2. Env. Fidelity
Sandboxed
Containerized
Sandboxed
Containerized
3. Capability
Constrained
Constrained
Constrained
Open tools
4. Scoring
Human rubric
Rule-based
Rule-based
LLM-judge
5. Granularity
Outcome
Action
Action
Pattern
6. Safety-Utility
Safety-only
Separate
Safety-only
Separate
Table 3: Taxonomy coordinates for the four consistency-check benchmarks.
Rule-based 28; LLM-judge 7; Hybrid 4; Human rubrics 1
Evaluation granularity
Action 16; Pattern 11; Outcome 10; Disposition 3
Safety-utility coupling
Safety-only 24; Separate 12; Joint 3; Over-refusal 1
Table 4: Corpus-level distribution of the six-axis taxonomy across the 40 core behavioral benchmarks.
Category
Risk
Primary
% Peer-Rev.
R1
Misuse
4
25%
R2
Injection
5
60%
R3
Tool Misuse
5
60%
R4
Misalignment
4
50%
R5
Multi-Agent
9
22%
R6
Memory
7
71%
Table 5: Summary of core behavioral-benchmark coverage by risk category. Counts indicate benchmarks with primary coverage of each risk; adjacent artifacts are excluded from this summary.
Figure 2: Heatmap of the risk–benchmark coverage matrix for 40 core behavioral benchmarks (full 45-entry table in Appendix B ). Dark = primary focus, light = secondary/partial, white = no coverage.
Figure 3: Radar chart of risk coverage among the 40 core behavioral benchmarks. Dark = primary coverage; light = secondary/partial. R10 (Robustness) has only secondary coverage.
Model
AH
CI
AD
CI
IA
CI
OD
CI
GPT-5.4
.04
[.01,.13]
1.0
[.98,1.]
.00
[.00,.07]
.24
[.16,.34]
Qwen 3.5 Plus
.04
[.01,.13]
.50
[.43,.56]
.00
[.00,.07]
.36
[.26,.47]
Claude Opus 4.6
.06
[.02,.16]
1.0
[.98,1.]
.00
[.00,.07]
.12
[.06,.20]
Gemini 3.1 Pro
.06
[.02,.16]
1.0
[.98,1.]
.00
[.00,.07]
.45
[.35,.56]
GPT-OSS-20B
.06
[.02,.16]
.55
[.49,.61]
.00
[.00,.07]
.33
[.23,.43]
GPT-OSS-120B
.10
[.04,.21]
.50
[.44,.57]
.00
[.00,.07]
.39
[.29,.50]
Table 6: Cross-benchmark consistency check ( n=12 models). Higher scores are less safe. 95% Wilson CIs in brackets.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Benchmark
R1
R2
R3
R4
R5
R6
R7
R8
R9
R10
Harmful Task Execution
AgentHarm
●
○
◐
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
Agent-SafetyBench
●
○
●
○
○
○
◐
○
◐
◐
SafePro
●
○
◐
●
○
○
◐
○
◐
○
MACHIAVELLI
○
○
○
●
○
○
○
○
○
○
Security / Prompt Injection
Appendix
Table 7: Full risk–entry coverage matrix. ● = primary focus, ◐ = secondary/partial coverage, ○ = not covered. Entries are grouped by primary focus area. Rows marked with † are adjacent artifacts.
Benchmark
Year
Venue
Tasks
Tools
Primary Risk
Env. Type
Eval. Method
Key Metric
AgentHarm
2024
ICLR’25
440
104
Harmful compliance
Synthetic tools
Human rubrics
Harm score
Agent-SafetyBench
2024
arXiv
2,000
349
General safety
Simulated
Fine-tuned judge
Safety score
SafePro
2026
arXiv
275
–
Professional misuse
Code agent
LLM-as-judge
Unsafe rate
MACHIAVELLI
2023
ICML’23
572K
–
Ethics/reward
Text games
Annotation
Ethical score
ASB
2024
ICLR’25
400+
400+
Attack/defense
Multi-domain
ASR metrics
ASR
AgentDojo
2024
NeurIPS’24
629
∼ 100
Prompt injection
Tool-use sim
State checks
Util.+ASR
Appendix
Table 8: Comprehensive comparison of agent-safety evaluation entries. “–” indicates not applicable or not reported. Rows marked with † are adjacent artifacts rather than core behavioral benchmarks.
Benchmark
Adversarial Pressure Source
Environment Fidelity
Capability Envelope
Scoring Method
Evaluation Granularity
Safety-Utility Coupling
AgentHarm
User-directed
Sandboxed
Constrained tools
Human rubrics
Outcome
Safety-only
Agent-SafetyBench
User-directed
Sandboxed
Constrained tools
LLM-judge
Pattern
Safety-only
SafePro
User-directed
Sandboxed
Open tools
LLM-judge
Outcome
Safety-only
MACHIAVELLI
Structural/ incentive-based
Sandboxed
Text-only
Rule-based
Pattern
Separate reporting
ASB
Environmental
Sandboxed
Constrained tools
Rule-based
Action
Safety-only
AgentDojo
Environmental
Containerized
Constrained tools
Rule-based
Action
Separate reporting
Appendix
Table 9: Entry-level six-axis taxonomy codings. Full entries are shown to make the coding auditable from the manuscript itself. Rows marked with † are adjacent artifacts.
Evaluating the safety of LLM-based agents is increasingly important because risks in realistic deployments often emerge over multi-step interactions rather than isolated prompts or final responses. Existing trajectory-level benchmarks remain limited by insufficient interaction diversity, coarse observability of safety failures, and weak long-horizon realism. We introduce ATBench, a trajectory-level benchmark for structured, diverse, and realistic evaluation of agent safety. ATBench organizes agentic risk along three dimensions: risk source, failure mode, and real-world harm. Based on this taxonomy, we construct trajectories with heterogeneous tool pools and a long-context delayed-trigger protocol that captures realistic risk emergence across multiple stages. The benchmark contains 1,000 trajectories (503 safe and 497 unsafe), averaging 9.01 turns and 3.95k tokens, with 1,954 invoked tools drawn from pools spanning 2,084 available tools. Data quality is supported by rule-based and LLM-based filtering plus full human audit. Experiments on frontier LLMs, open-source models, and specialized guard systems show that ATBench is challenging even for strong evaluators, while enabling taxonomy-stratified analysis, cross-benchmark comparison, and diagnosis of long-horizon failure patterns.
The rapid expansion of large language model (LLM) safety evaluation has produced a substantial benchmark ecosystem, but not a correspondingly coherent measurement ecosystem. We present AISafetyBenchExplorer, a structured catalogue of 195 AI safety benchmarks released between 2018 and 2026, organized through a multi-sheet schema that records benchmark-level metadata, metric-level definitions, benchmark-paper metadata, and repository activity. This design enables meta-analysis not only of what benchmarks exist, but also of how safety is operationalized, aggregated, and judged across the literature. Using the updated catalogue, we identify a central structural problem: benchmark proliferation has outpaced measurement standardization. The current landscape is dominated by medium-complexity benchmarks (94/195), while only 7 benchmarks occupy the Popular tier. The workbook further reports strong concentration around English-only evaluation (165/195), evaluation-only resources (170/195), stale GitHub repositories (137/195), stale Hugging Face datasets (96/195), and heavy reliance on arXiv preprints among benchmarks with known venue metadata. At the metric level, the catalogue shows that familiar labels such as accuracy, F1 score, safety score, and aggregate benchmark scores often conceal materially different judges, aggregation rules, and threat models. We argue that the field's main failure mode is fragmentation rather than scarcity. Researchers now have many benchmark artifacts, but they often lack a shared measurement language, a principled basis for benchmark selection, and durable stewardship norms for post publication maintenance. AISafetyBenchExplorer addresses this gap by providing a traceable benchmark catalogue, a controlled metadata schema, and a complexity taxonomy that together support more rigorous benchmark discovery, comparison, and meta-evaluation.
Agent benchmarks are increasingly used to compare large language models (LLMs) across domains, yet a reported score reflects a complete model--harness--environment configuration rather than the model alone. Benchmark packages couple native tasks with specific prompts, tool protocols, orchestration logic, and sometimes dynamic external resources, making cross-benchmark comparisons sensitive to implementation and resource conditions. We present UniACE, a unified framework for model-centric evaluation under an explicit, common execution condition. UniACE represents each benchmark as an instruction--tool--environment triplet, executes LLMs through a shared, task-agnostic harness in isolated per-task runtimes, and preserves native success criteria. For tasks that rely on dynamic resources, an optional offline mode replaces live access with fixed, pre-collected snapshots. Its evaluation protocol further standardizes efficiency measurement, execution records, and trace-based failure attribution. We migrate 7 benchmarks spanning 24 domains and evaluate 15 models in more than 400K rollouts consuming 5B tokens. Comparisons with source implementations show large bidirectional score changes and model-ranking reversals, while matched online and offline runs reveal substantial sensitivity to accessible evidence and its representation. Under the shared UniACE configuration, efficiency and failure profiles expose task-dependent model behaviors hidden by task-success scores alone. These findings motivate reporting agent benchmark outcomes as properties of an explicit evaluation configuration, enabling more interpretable and reproducible cross-benchmark comparisons. Codes and benchmarks at are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/A-Unified-Framework-for-the-Evaluation-of-LLM-Agentic-Capabilities, https://huggingface.co/datasets/whfeLingYu/Unified_Agent_Framework.
Pengyu Zhu, Lijun Li, Yaxing Lyu +8
1Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · 2Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · 4North China Electric Power University +1