Practitioner: Tool-Call Trajectories Are Higher-Signal Than CoT for Agent Monitoring

joshua_saxe · x · 2026-09-04

Drawing on hands-on experience, Joshua Saxe argues CoT monitoring is useful but lower-signal than simply looking at the n-gram of tool calls up to time t and gating the next tool call on what the trajectory suggests.

A concrete alternative from a security practitioner: monitor observable behavior sequences instead of the model's inner monologue for agent anomaly detection. He tags another researcher for input.

Related event: Researchers Map Agent-Era AI Safety: Monitoring vs Productivity(4 posts)→

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