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...
| Authors | Rishi Jha, Harold Triedman, Arkaprabha Bhattacharya et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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