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We're excited to announce our new work!
Asynchronous monitoring, incident investigations, and compliance audits primarily rely on agent traces to reconstruct a sequence of actions taken by agents. These analyses assume that LLM agents cannot tamper with their own execution traces. We show that local LLM agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Open Code and Grok Build fail to enforce this boundary. All tested harnesses, except Muse Code, allowed agents to delete their traces when asked, without triggering monitor guardrails.
This demonstrates a critical gap on two levels:
1. the low refusal rate on a model level suggests that current alignment training does not sufficiently discourage trace tampering, creating a risk of malicious or accidental manipulation of execution traces,
2. on the harness level, common agent CLIs and configurations also do not provide very effective safeguards against trace tampering.
At Exponential, we are actively working on security and safety benchmarks, both public and private. Get in touch if you are interested!
More details: expsec.ai.
Asynchronous monitoring, incident investigations, and compliance audits primarily rely on agent traces to reconstruct a sequence of actions taken by agents. These analyses assume that LLM agents cannot tamper with their own execution traces. We show that local LLM agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Open Code and Grok Build fail to enforce this boundary. All tested harnesses, except Muse Code, allowed agents to delete their traces when asked, without triggering monitor guardrails.
This demonstrates a critical gap on two levels:
1. the low refusal rate on a model level suggests that current alignment training does not sufficiently discourage trace tampering, creating a risk of malicious or accidental manipulation of execution traces,
2. on the harness level, common agent CLIs and configurations also do not provide very effective safeguards against trace tampering.
At Exponential, we are actively working on security and safety benchmarks, both public and private. Get in touch if you are interested!
More details: expsec.ai.