BioSecBench-Refusal: A paired metric for performance and alignment in agentic biosecurity risk assessment
As AI agents are incorporated into life science workflows, the capabilities that speed discovery might also enable misuse. We present BioSecBench-Refusal, a benchmark for risk identification and refusal behavior for biological research tasks. The benchmark pairs 61 Routine tasks, legitimate analyses adapted from the published literature, with 46 Red-Team tasks, fictional scenarios that resemble real research but conceal a biosecurity hazard. Across 16 model-harness configurations, refusal rates ranged from 7 percent to 74 percent on Routine tasks and 1 percent to 62 percent on Red-Team tasks, with many configurations refusing legitimate Routine work at comparable or higher rates than conc...
| Authors | Edwin H. Wintermute, Harmon Bhasin, Christina M. Agapakis et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 6 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 July 2026 |
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