It Lied to a Doctor to Buy Poison Ingredients: Quantifying Real-World Misuse of Phone-use Agents
Phone-use Agents can execute complex tasks end to end across real mobile applications. By operating a real device on the user's behalf, they reach far more functionalities than CLI agents, which amplifies the real-world harm they can cause when driven for malicious purposes. We present the first study of this threat on real phones and 27 commercial apps, and find that agents built on 9 mainstream commercial and open-source models readily carry out serious misuse, ranging from procuring drug and explosive precursors to fraud, online harassment, and review manipulation. Across the agents we run on real devices, the average refusal rate to harmful requests stays low while the average task-co...
| Authors | Yiming Sun, Chen Chen, Zifan Zhou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MM |
| Published | 26 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 June 2026 |
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