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AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2604.0294792.13 citationsh-index: 2
Predicted impact top 14% in AI · last 90 daysOriginality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

This addresses safety challenges for users of autonomous agents in computing environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmark and evaluation methods.

The paper tackles the problem of harmful behavior in computer-use agents, which can emerge through sequences of locally plausible steps, and presents AgentHazard, a benchmark with 2,653 instances, finding that current systems like Claude Code powered by Qwen3-Coder have an attack success rate of 73.63%.

Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to persistent action over tools, files, and execution environments. Unlike chat systems, they maintain state across interactions and translate intermediate outputs into concrete actions. This creates a distinct safety challenge in that harmful behavior may emerge through sequences of individually plausible steps, including intermediate actions that appear locally acceptable but collectively lead to unauthorized actions. We present \textbf{AgentHazard}, a benchmark for evaluating harmful behavior in computer-use agents. AgentHazard contains \textbf{2,653} instances spanning diverse risk categories and attack strategies. Each instance pairs a harmful objective with a sequence of operational steps that are locally legitimate but jointly induce unsafe behavior. The benchmark evaluates whether agents can recognize and interrupt harm arising from accumulated context, repeated tool use, intermediate actions, and dependencies across steps. We evaluate AgentHazard on Claude Code, OpenClaw, and IFlow using mostly open or openly deployable models from the Qwen3, Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek families. Our experimental results indicate that current systems remain highly vulnerable. In particular, when powered by Qwen3-Coder, Claude Code exhibits an attack success rate of \textbf{73.63\%}, suggesting that model alignment alone does not reliably guarantee the safety of autonomous agents.

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