Safety Does Not Compose: Non-Decaying Loop State for Autonomous LLM Agents

arXiv:2608.27141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly deployed as autonomous loops. Starting from one human goal, such a system repeatedly discovers work, plans, executes tool calls, verifies outcomes and persists state across many unattended iterations. The agent safeguards in wide use, however, are defined over a single trajectory, and their safety state is re-initialized when the next trajectory begins. We show that this is a failure of composition rather than an implementation detail. Our central result is a separation: against an attack whose evidence is fragmented across several iterations, every trajectory-scoped monitor has a true-positive rate equal to its false-positive rate, however expressive it is, because the evidence it would need never appears in the window it sees, whereas a monitor retaining cross-iteration state separates the two perfectly. We further show that the obvious repair of carrying a geometrically decaying risk score is insufficient, because the cooling-off period a patient adversary must wait is a constant that does not grow with the horizon N. We then present LoopHarness, which restores a persistent, non-decaying safety state at the loop level. Under mediated commits and an arbiter detection floor elta_M, it bounds the expected number of unauthorized irreversible actions by B+m-1+m/elta_M, a constant in N, of which the B+m-1 term is decided by a model-free rule and therefore survives a fully colluding verifier. We give a complete evaluation protocol on native Agent-SafetyBench tasks with paired clean and attacked episodes, an outer-state attack suite whose decisive evidence exists only across iterations, per-module ablations, and an adaptive white-box red team.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-28

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