TAC, the first agentic benchmark for implicit animal welfare, tests AI agents' ability to avoid animal exploitation in travel booking scenarios. All seven frontier models score below 64%, with the best at 53%, and even minor prompt improvements yield only modest gains. An audit finds no signs of evaluation awareness, indicating performance gaps stem from lack of true welfare reasoning, not prompt recognition.
Agentic Benchmark Reveals AI Models Fail to Avoid Animal Exploitation
TAC: First Agentic Benchmark for Animal Welfare in AI
TAC evaluates whether AI agents avoid animal exploitation in travel bookings. Seven frontier models all score below 64% chance level, with Claude Opus 4.7 at 53%. Adding a welfare-aware system prompt improves performance significantly, though models show no evidence of evaluation awareness in their responses.
NRT-Bench: Multi-turn Red-teaming of LLM Agents in Safety-Critical Systems
NRT-Bench introduces a benchmark for multi-turn red-teaming of LLM agents operating in a simulated nuclear power plant. Across four frontier operator models, 8.7% to 12.1% of attack sessions result in loss of a critical safety function, with vulnerabilities largely disjoint across models. The effectiveness of defences varies significantly by model, showing strong model dependence.
Defensive Misdirection Against Automated Attacks on Agentic AI
Agentic AI systems face growing threats from model-guided automated attacks. A new defense strategy, Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), reduces attacker success rates by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in benchmark tests.
Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents
LLM agents commonly select higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives. This over-privileged behavior is amplified by transient tool failures and does not reliably improve with general safety alignment. A new privilege-aware post-training defense reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while maintaining agent capabilities.
TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction
TRAP evaluates how well models complete tasks using private data without leaking it. Across 22 models, all show non-trivial privacy leakage, with instruction-following ability linked to higher leakage. Structural private field isolation prevents leakage by replacing private fields with hash keys, maintaining task accuracy without sacrificing privacy.