When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents
As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring r...
| Authors | Kaiyue Yang, Yuyan Bu, Jingwei Yi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 July 2026 |
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