benchmarks evals
The Request Was Benign. The Calendar Leak Was Not.
BARC-Bench tests whether agents infer unstated boundaries from workspace context; even the strongest configuration violated safety on more than a quarter of tasks.
Summary
BARC-Bench tests whether agents infer unstated boundaries from workspace context; even the strongest configuration violated safety on more than a quarter of tasks.
BARC-Bench contains 110 simulated workspace tasks in which an ordinary request leaves room for an unsafe implementation. Scheduling an off-boarding discussion, for example, should not expose a resignation through a shared invitation. Four frontier configurations were each tried five times per task. Depending on the system, only 9.1 to 72.7 percent of tasks were completed safely on all five attempts; the strongest still violated a boundary on 27.3 percent of tasks. The benchmark's records and social norms define those judgments, so the figures are not a direct production incident rate. They do show why task completion alone is an inadequate agent metric when critical constraints remain implicit.
Why it matters
BARC-Bench tests whether agents infer unstated boundaries from workspace context; even the strongest configuration violated safety on more than a quarter of tasks.
Limits and context
- Scheduling an off-boarding discussion, for example, should not expose a resignation through a shared invitation.
- Depending on the system, only 9.1 to 72.7 percent of tasks were completed safely on all five attempts; the strongest still violated a boundary on 27.3 percent of tasks.
- The benchmark's records and social norms define those judgments, so the figures are not a direct production incident rate.
Key claims
BARC-Bench tests whether agents infer unstated boundaries from workspace context; even the strongest configuration violated safety on more than a quarter of tasks.
Qualification: Scheduling an off-boarding discussion, for example, should not expose a resignation through a shared invitation.
Evidence: source-2026-10-26-007
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2610.32024, original v1arXiv · primary research
Corrections
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