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    "headline": "A Robot Could Finish and Still Leave a Hazard",
    "slug": "a-robot-could-finish-and-still-leave-a-hazard",
    "dek": "SafeStage checks risks before, during and after manipulation across 97 scenarios.",
    "summary": "SafeStage checks risks before, during and after manipulation across 97 scenarios.",
    "body_text": "SafeStage separates task success from manipulation safety in 97 designed scenarios. It evaluates initial hazards, unsafe contacts and trajectories during execution, and unstable or unsafe final states after nominal completion. Tests of representative vision-language-action and world-model-based robot policies found that completed tasks could still contain safety violations, with different policies failing at different stages. The benchmark diagnoses failure modes in a controlled protocol; it does not certify a real robot as safe.",
    "why_it_matters": "SafeStage checks risks before, during and after manipulation across 97 scenarios.",
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      "The benchmark diagnoses failure modes in a controlled protocol; it does not certify a real robot as safe."
    ],
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-21T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "qualification": "The benchmark diagnoses failure modes in a controlled protocol; it does not certify a real robot as safe."
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    "tags": [
      "robot safety",
      "VLA",
      "benchmark"
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      "source_id": "source-2026-09-21-008",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.21223",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-09-17T22:12:40.000-04:00",
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    "name": "The Machine Press",
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    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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    "title": "A Robot Could Finish and Still Leave a Hazard",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-21T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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