BARC-Bench:良性请求,风险后果
BARC-Bench: Benign Asks, Risky Consequences
Kangkang Li, Kelvin Luu, Lily Ma, Tu Trinh, Ying Liu, Mohamed Elfeki
AI 速览:作者提出 BARC-Bench 基准,用 110 个表面良性但暗含安全边界的任务,评估智能体在欠指定指令下是否会越界。
Task instructions from users for agents are inherently underspecified, especially regarding safety boundaries--creating behavioral risks. To study these risks, we introduce BARC-Bench, a collection of 110 tasks across nine simulated workspace environments where benign requests leave openings for unsafe actions. In this benchmark, we evaluate agent behavior against safety boundaries established by workspace records, implicit environmental context, and unstated social norms. For example, an agent asked to schedule off-boarding discussions must arrange the meeting without prematurely revealing an employee's resignation through a shared calendar invitation. Evaluating four frontier model configurations across five attempts per task reveals that models are not consistently safe: the share of tasks completed safely on all five attempts ranges from 9.1% to 72.7%, with even the strongest configuration producing a safety violation on 27.3% of tasks. These results highlight an asymmetric operational risk: while models frequently complete complex workflows, their inability to consistently respect unstated boundaries presents a substantial barrier to safe autonomous delegation.