Explore/agent app/Operational Hallucination and Safety Drift in AI Agents
O

Shasha Yu, Fiona Carroll, Barry L. Bentley/Operational Hallucination and Safety Drift in AI AgentsUnknown

Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution. While single-turn safety mechanisms are relatively mature, extended interactions reveal structural vulnerabilities where initial alignment degrades over time. This paper empirically characterizes two observed failure modes across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs: Safety Drift, the gradual erosion of declared safety intent leading to constraint-violating actions (e.g., textual refusal followed by reconnaissance and unsafe execution), and Operational Hallucination, persistent repetitive tool calls indicative of flawed state perception (e.g., livelocks even in legitimate tasks). Through controlled multi-turn evaluation on high-stakes ethical dilemmas, malicious requests, and benign controls, we quantify these phenomena using declaration-action gap and livelock metrics, demonstrating their cross-model prevalence under direct execution protocols. Root-cause analysis attributes the instabilities to the decoupling of reasoning context from execution state in current agent loops. We propose an Action-Aware Supervision Layer - a lightweight, plug-and-play architectural blueprint incorporating intent-action consistency checks, runtime state tracking, and forced termination primitives. Post-hoc simulation on captured failure trajectories shows the layer can intercept observed violations without false positives on benign cases. This work advances agent reliability by shifting focus from linguistic safeguards to enforceable architectural mechanisms for responsible agentic AI.

agent app
GitHubCompare
Refreshed 27d ago
OverviewActivity52wAlternativesDocs
Stars0
Forks0
HF Downloads—30d
Last commit—
Refreshed27d ago
Project healthUnknownNo activity data.
Production readinessResearch / EarlyBest for exploration and prototyping.
Risk notesUnknown licenseVerify license before production use.
AgentHub Score
55 / 100
Composite score from 6 signals. How we score →
Active project
55Score
Growth
40C
Activity
30C
Documentation
70C+
Maturity
45C
Community
42C
Production
58C
GitHub stars · 41 days observed0 not enough history
snapshots
Repository activity · 41 days observedReal snapshots from pushed_at
inactivepushed
2026-07-262026-09-06
Practical assessment
Should you use it?

✓ Best for

  • Research and experimentation
  • Prototype development
  • Learning agentic patterns

◎ Strengths

  • Active community
  • Open source
  • Well-documented API

✕ Not ideal for

  • Untested at scale without validation
  • Teams without AI/ML expertise

⚠ Watch-outs

  • Review changelog before updating
  • Verify license for commercial use
Technical details
What's inside
Language—
License—
Sourcearxiv
Open source✗ No
Commercial use—
Docs—
Demo—

AgentHub Score

55
Score 55/100
Below average

Alternatives

O
OccuReward: LLM-Guided Occupant-Centric Reward Shaping for Demographic Equity in Grid-Interactive Buildings
0 · agent app
55
A
A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms
0 · agent app
55
U
Unaccountable Delegation, Fading Skills: Mapping the Risks of Workplace AI Agents
0 · agent app
55
S
SysEvolve: An AI-native, safe, autonomous adversarial attack-defense co-evolutionary system
0 · agent app
55Compare all →

Recent activity

Latest commit ——
Indexed by AgentHub crawler27d ago
Monitor for new releasesongoing