Ghost Tool Calls: Issue-Time Privacy for Speculative Agent Tools
Tool-augmented language agents speculatively issue likely future tool calls to hide latency, but those calls leak inferred user intent to external services before the agent commits to the branch. Every external observer that received the call retains the disclosure after the agent abandons the branch. Timing is the issue, not authorization: no commit-time cleanup, read-only restriction, or access-control allow-list unsends what an observer already holds. We call these invocations ghost tool calls and propose Speculative Tool Privacy Contracts, a runtime abstraction that treats observation before commitment as a first-class effect, distinct from state mutation. We implement the contracts i...
| Authors | Bardia Mohammadi, Lars Klein, Akhil Arora et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 1 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 June 2026 |
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