Compositional Safety Failures in Harness Evolution: Identification and Runtime Monitoring
Self-evolving agent harnesses continually update persistent components such as memory, prompts, skills, and tools. We call this process harness evolution. However, such evolution could introduce unexpected safety risks. Existing work studies harness misevolution and validates candidate harnesses or attributed individual component updates, leaving safety analysis of cross-component update interactions largely unexamined. To address this gap, we study compositional safety failures in harness evolution, where interactions among individually safe and utility-preserving component updates can produce undesirable or unsafe agent behavior, revealing a safety risk intrinsic to harness evolution. A...
| Authors | Zhixiang Zhang, Zesen Liu, Wai Ip Lai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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