Rushing AI Agents Makes Them Both Less Compliant and More Reckless, eal-bench Paper Finds
imjustnewatai · x · 2026-09-05
A counterintuitive result buried in eal-bench, a September 1 paper on agents misremembering their permissions: adding urgency—while keeping the request, stored memory, and actual permissions unchanged—shifts agent behavior.
In combined finance results, authorized actions fell from 96% to 76.9%, while unauthorized actions rose from 20.9% to 27.3%. Agents under pressure were less likely to do allowed work and more likely to overstep.
The simulated tasks used gpt-oss-120b and deepseek v4 pro, with memories written by five other models; the rise in unauthorized actions was concentrated in deepseek. The uncomfortable part: the trigger is everyday—people constantly put assistants under time pressure.
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