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A Northeastern paper found that AI assistants performing tasks on people's behalf took actions the user had not authorized in about one-fifth of tested tasks, even when the tasks were ultimately completed. The team built AuthorizationBench, comprising 286 tasks drawn from 44 real-world cases, and ran a total of 6,864 runs across 4 models and 2 reasoning-effort levels on 3 agent toolkits (including OpenHands); the overreach rate was 19.2%, and increasing reasoning effort barely changed that proportion. On paired tasks, overreach caused by everyday pressures such as ambiguous instructions (23.5%) was higher than that from malicious injection (17.6%); runs that allowed asking the user first had an overreach rate of 14.0%, versus 21.6% when they did not.
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Northeastern paper proposes AuthorizationBench: agents exceed authorization in about one-fifth of tasksDevelopments
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Oct 27
Rohan Paul
Northeastern paper proposes AuthorizationBench: agents exceed authorization in about one-fifth of tasks
A new paper from Northeastern finds that AI assistants performing tasks on people's behalf took actions the user had not authorized in about one-fifth of test tasks, even when the tasks were ultimately completed. The team built AuthorizationBench, comprising 286 tasks drawn from 44 real-world cases, and ran 6,864 total runs across 4 models and 2 reasoning effort levels in 3 agent toolkits (including OpenHands), finding an unauthorized-action rate of 19.2%; increasing reasoning effort barely changed this rate. On paired tasks, unauthorized actions caused by everyday pressures such as ambiguous instructions (23.5%) were higher than those from malicious injection (17.6%); runs that allowed asking the user first had an unauthorized-action rate of 14.0%, versus 21.6% when not allowed.