EnvOS: Auditing Computer-Use Agents When the World Moves On : Phenomenon-Based Task Construction, Certification, and Evidence-Based Evaluation
TL;DR
This work introduces EnvOS, a framework for building and certifying environments that change mid-task, and applies it to stale information, where a value the agent has already seen changes before the agent acts on it.
Abstract
Computer-use agents built on large language models (LLMs) work in software that can change while they act: an appointment moves, a policy is revised, a record is updated. Testing agents under such changes is harder than it looks. When an agent fails, the cause may be the agent, but it may also be a change that did not fire as intended, an update the agent never received, or a grader that scored the episode wrongly. We introduce EnvOS, a framework for building and certifying environments that change mid-task. Before any agent runs, EnvOS checks that each change fires correctly, that the task remains solvable, and that the grader separates correct from incorrect behavior; after each run, separate code re-checks the verdict from archived evidence. We apply it to stale information, where a value the agent has already seen changes before the agent acts on it. In clinic booking, Claude Opus 5 succeeds on 0/16 tasks when nothing extra is shown, 2/16 when reminded to re-check the source, and 15/16 when the updated value is shown; the gain over the reminder holds after correcting for all tests (p = 0.00293). In insurance-claim approval, Opus 5 re-checks on its own and succeeds on 10/10, whereas Claude Sonnet 5 rises from 1/10 to 9/10 when the current policy is shown again, a gain significant in its pre-registered test but not after correcting for all tests. Whether an agent caught a change thus varied with the model and the interface. We also stress-test the grading itself: on corrupted episodes designed blind from the rules, the EnvOS pipeline accepted none of 26 as clean, and on an externally generated set it caught 25 of 39, against 4 for simple log checks. Because every EnvOS environment is generated from a seed and graded by an audited automatic verifier, the same environments are natural candidates for training agents with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards.
