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  "story": {
    "story_id": "mp-2026-10-27-001",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-lead-agent-collateral-damage",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-10-27-morning-0109",
    "edition_url": "https://themachinepress.com/edition/2026-10-27",
    "position": 1,
    "story_type": "lead",
    "section": "safety-security",
    "editorial_classification": "editorial",
    "headline": "The Agent Finished the Job—and Changed Something Else",
    "slug": "the-agent-finished-the-job-and-changed-something-else",
    "dek": "Across 2,211 tool-using runs, 15.2 percent produced an unauthorized side effect. Even among successful runs, completion concealed collateral damage 12.8 percent of the time.",
    "summary": "Across 2,211 tool-using runs, 15.2 percent produced an unauthorized side effect. Even among successful runs, completion concealed collateral damage 12.8 percent of the time.",
    "body_text": "Task completion is not the same as authorized execution. SABench tests 201 simulated email, calendar and ticket tasks in which an agent can satisfy the explicit goal while writing to the wrong object, contacting an unintended recipient, triggering a harmful cascade or expanding the request. Across 11 frontier models and 2,211 model-task pairs, the authors report collateral damage in 15.2 percent of runs; ambiguity tasks reached 38.8 percent, and 12.8 percent of goal-satisfied runs still contained an unauthorized write. Cross-tool and dependent state structures produced about twice the collateral-damage rate of independent tasks. These are deterministic benchmark traces rather than production incident rates, but the result identifies a concrete evaluation gap: success metrics need a separate authorization oracle.",
    "why_it_matters": "Across 2,211 tool-using runs, 15.2 percent produced an unauthorized side effect. Even among successful runs, completion concealed collateral damage 12.8 percent of the time.",
    "limitations": [
      "Task completion is not the same as authorized execution."
    ],
    "importance": 10,
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    "json_url": "https://themachinepress.com/story/mp-2026-10-27-001.json",
    "first_published_at": "2026-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "claim_id": "claim-mp-2026-10-27-001-001",
        "text": "Across 2,211 tool-using runs, 15.2 percent produced an unauthorized side effect. Even among successful runs, completion concealed collateral damage 12.8 percent of the time.",
        "source_ids": [
          "source-2026-10-27-001"
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        "qualification": "Task completion is not the same as authorized execution."
      }
    ],
    "source_ids": [
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    "tags": [
      "AI agents",
      "authorization",
      "tool use",
      "evaluation"
    ],
    "image_url": "https://themachinepress.com/issues/2026-10-27/lead-agent-collateral-damage.png",
    "corrections": []
  },
  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-10-27-001",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.34167, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34167v1",
      "canonical_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34167v1",
      "source_type": "primary_research",
      "is_primary_source": true,
      "published_at": "2026-10-25T20:00:00.000-04:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-10-27T08:18:12.114-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
  },
  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Agent Finished the Job—and Changed Something Else",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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