ANCHOR: Automated Alignment Auditing for CLI Agents on Real-World Harm

Safety alignment in LLMs aims to align models with human values, but which values take precedence when they conflict? We investigate this question in the context of tool-calling LLM agents deployed in regulated industries, where agents processing confidential documents may encounter content that triggers safety-trained values (e.g., public welfare) that conflict with deployment-context instructions (e.g., internal logging). To empirically verify this phenomenon, we build a benchmark of 128 scenarios across 16 domains. We find that safety-aligned open-source models override their deployment instructions up to 43.4% of the time, engaging in whistleblowing, data exfiltration, and evidence tampering when processing documents that suggest organizational wrongdoing. We also find that abliteration reduces rates of external whistleblowing. These results reveal a fundamental tension in pluralistic alignment, where the same safety training that protects users can cause agents to act against deployment instructions in ways that create unpredictable liability risks. We release our benchmark as a framework to support evaluation of agent behavior under competing legitimate interests.

Computer-using agents (CUAs), which can autonomously control computers to perform multi-step actions, might pose significant safety risks if misused. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate LMs in chatbots or simple tool use. To more comprehensively evaluate CUAs' misuse risks, we introduce a new benchmark: CUAHarm. CUAHarm consists of 104 expert-written realistic misuse risks, such as disabling firewalls, leaking data, or installing backdoors. We provide a sandbox with rule-based verifiable rewards to measure CUAs' success rates in executing these tasks (e.g., whether the firewall is indeed disabled), beyond refusal rates. We evaluate frontier LMs including GPT-5, Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama-3.3-70B, and Mistral Large 2. Even without jailbreaking prompts, these frontier LMs comply with executing these malicious tasks at a high success rate (e.g., 90% for Gemini 2.5 Pro). Furthermore, while newer models are safer in previous safety benchmarks, their misuse risks as CUAs become even higher, e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro is riskier than Gemini 1.5 Pro. Additionally, while these LMs are robust to common malicious prompts (e.g., creating a bomb) when acting as chatbots, they could still act unsafely as CUAs. We further evaluate a leading agentic framework (UI-TARS-1.5) and find that while it improves performance, it also amplifies misuse risks. To mitigate the misuse risks of CUAs, we explore using LMs to monitor CUAs' actions. We find monitoring unsafe computer-using actions is significantly harder than monitoring conventional unsafe chatbot responses. While monitoring chain-of-thoughts leads to modest gains, the average monitoring accuracy is only 77%. A hierarchical summarization strategy improves performance by up to 13%, a promising direction though monitoring remains unreliable. CUAHarm is released at https://github.com/db-ol/CUAHarm to facilitate further research.

Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.