Reason Less, Verify More: Deterministic Gates Recover a Silent Policy-Violation Failure Mode in Tool-Using LLM Agents
Tool-using LLM agents can violate the very policies they are deployed to enforce while appearing to complete the task successfully. In policy-permissive environments, a tool may execute any well-formed call even when the corresponding state transition is forbidden by domain policy. The result is a silent wrong state (a booking cancelled, a passenger count changed, a claim acted on without verification) that neither the tool nor the agent's self-report exposes. We study this failure mode in the $τ^2$-bench airline domain. On a budget agent, 78% of observed failures are silent wrong-state failures with no tool error, and the aggregate failure rate is reproducible across disjoint seeds, not ...
| Authors | Vikas Reddy, Sumanth Reddy Challaram, Abhishek Basu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 July 2026 |
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