Overeager Coding Agents: Measuring Out-of-Scope Actions on Benign Tasks
Coding agents now run autonomously with shell, file, and network privileges. When a user issues a benign request, the agent sometimes does more than asked: it deletes unrelated files, wipes a stale credentials backup, or rewrites configuration the user never mentioned. We call these scope expansions overeager actions, an authorization problem distinct from capability failures, prompt injection, or sandbox escapes. We present OverEager-Gen, a benchmark dedicated to overeager behavior on benign tasks. Building it surfaces a measurement-validity issue: if a benchmark spells out the authorized scope inside the prompt, the agent stops inferring boundaries and starts pattern-matching declaratio...
| Authors | Yubin Qu, Ying Zhang, Yanjun Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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