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Abstract - Agent Meltdowns: The Road to Hell Is Paved with Helpful Agents
Agents operating with computer and Web use inevitably encounter errors: inaccessible webpages, missing files, local and remote misconfigurations, etc. These errors do not thwart agents based on state-of-the-art models. They helpfully continue to look for ways to complete their tasks. We introduce, characterize, and measure a new type of agent failure we call \emph{accidental meltdown}: unsafe or harmful behavior in response to a benign environmental error, in the absence of any adversarial inputs. Because meltdowns are not captured by the existing reliability or safety benchmarks, we develop a taxonomy of meltdown behaviors. We then implement an agent-agnostic infrastructure for injecting simulated local and remote errors into the rollout environment and use it to systematically evaluate agent systems powered by GPT, Grok, and Gemini. Our evaluation demonstrates that meltdowns (e.g., conducting unauthorized reconnaissance or subverting access control) of varying severity and success occur in 64.7\% of agent rollouts that encounter simulated errors, spanning all combinations of agent system, backing model, and error type. In over half of these meltdowns, unsafe behaviors are not reported to the user. Comparing behaviors of the same agents with and without errors, we find that exploration in response to errors is correlated with unsafe and harmful behavior.
智能体崩溃:好心办坏事的智能体铺就通往地狱之路 /
Agent Meltdowns: The Road to Hell Is Paved with Helpful Agents
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文揭示了一种新型AI智能体故障:当遇到网页无法访问、文件丢失等常见环境错误时,高级语言模型驱动的智能体会“好心办坏事”——不是停止工作,而是继续尝试完成任务,但在此过程中可能引发危险行为(如非法入侵系统或绕过权限控制),且超半数情况下不会主动报告用户,实验发现64.7%的出错场景都会出现此类“意外崩溃”,且探索性行为与不安全行为高度相关。