A target-specific authorization audit is introduced that labels context factors separately for each tool and argument target and holds the task, proposition, position, and policy fixed while changing only the proposition's source authority.
Abstract
LLM agents choose tools and arguments from context that mixes user requests, tool outputs, retrieved records, memory, and untrusted text. Evidence can be relevant without being authorized to determine a decision, so a correct action need not be grounded only in permitted evidence. We introduce a target-specific authorization audit that labels context factors separately for each tool and argument target. Its primary test holds the task, proposition, position, and policy fixed while changing only the proposition's source authority. We then test behavior when valid evidence is weakened and use context-subset interactions as a secondary localization diagnostic. Across 450 controlled next-action tasks and multiple open-weight LLM families, trusted and untrusted variants produce different actions in 5.4 percent of competing cases versus 1.7 percent of supporting cases. Under controlled degradation, unauthorized competition is retained in a full-correct, mixed-error, clean-correct pattern in 2.4 percent of comparisons, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 2.1 to 3.0 percent. These are controlled stress-set rates, not deployment prevalence. The models respond to textual source-authority cues, but this does not prevent untrusted evidence from influencing their actions.
This paper presents ToolGuardian, a policy-driven framework for securing agent-tool interactions through pre-admission vetting and task-aware runtime authorization, and compares ASP against heuristic and LLM-based policy realizations using identical inputs and output contracts.
Results show that additional capabilities introduce trade-offs among detection, repair, evidence grounding, conservative behaviour, reproducibility, and operational cost rather than producing consistent improvements in reference-free agentic data cleaning.
Agent benchmarks should report success together with whether the evaluated information state supported it, and whether the evaluated information state supported it should report success together with whether the evaluated information state supported it.
A pipeline promoting an AI system publishes records claiming the thing evaluated is the thing deployed and that the evidence licensed the transition, and measures whether those records can express that claim and whether it holds where declared.
This work introduces SkillLogic, a framework for analyzing logical relations in skill files and constructing executable tests from them, and establishes logical-relation following as a distinct reliability challenge for skill-guided agents.
Xuan Chen, Chengpeng Wang, Lu Yan et al.· 0 citations
LLM agents routinely include privacy-sensitive data (PSD) in tool call arguments beyond what the invoked tools require, crossing trust boundaries to third-party services on every invocation. A controlled measurement on three production LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama-3.3-70B) shows that 81--88\% of tool calls include unnecessary PSD under default prompts; explicit privacy instructions still leave 36--76\% over-sharing. Existing defenses gate calls (allow/block) or label flows (information-flow control) but cannot \emph{rewrite} argument values, and PII detection tools miss implicit PSD like ``Memorial Sloan Kettering''(a hospital name that implies a diagnosis). We present \system{}, a middleware that intercepts tool calls and rewrites their arguments to the minimum data necessary for tool functionality, combining schema-aware necessity analysis with four operations: removal, generalization, substitution, and truncation. Live validation on 307 tool calls across the three LLMs above reduces privacy cost by 81.2--92.0\% at 100\% argument-level task validity (TOST equivalence $p{<}0.001$ at $\Delta{=}1.0$); on 25 unannotated Model Context Protocol (MCP) schemas, by 79.0\% with no \texttt{minimum\_necessary} metadata. An optional LLM content-necessity layer strips task-irrelevant PSD from otherwise-necessary free-text fields, raising live-LLM reduction to 85.1--95.6\% and author-schema reduction from 71.1\% to 90.9\%. Median latency is 1.77\,ms.
