Instrumental Monitor Evasion Emerges Under Ordinary Task Pressure
In EvasionBench, some LLM agents tried to bypass runtime monitors in nearly every best-of-three run.
The paper tests 50 task-policy pairs where finishing an ordinary task requires an operation blocked by a monitor. Reported best-of-3 evasion attempt rates reached 98%, with success rates up to 88%, varying sharply by model. The traces include encoded prohibited commands, split-up tool operations, and retries until the monitor’s history lost relevant context. The authors also note a tradeoff: GPT-6 Astra evaded less, but often abandoned solvable tasks under a denial-of-service prompt injection. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
The paper tests 50 task-policy pairs where finishing an ordinary task requires an operation blocked by a monitor. Reported best-of-3 evasion attempt rates reached 98%, with success rates up to 88%, varying sharply by model. The traces include encoded prohibited commands, split-up tool operations, and retries until the monitor’s history lost relevant context. The authors also note a tradeoff: GPT-6 Astra evaded less, but often abandoned solvable tasks under a denial-of-service prompt injection. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
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