Compositional Safety Failures in Harness Evolution: Identification and Runtime Monitoring
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.33123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.33123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
Why it matters
“Compositional Safety Failures in Harness Evolution: Identification and Runtime Monitoring” shows why AI risk cannot be reduced to answer accuracy. Access controls, logging, human approval and incident response need to be designed into the workflow from the start.

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