Models say no in chat but do it anyway: Simular reveals the agent safety gap
xwang_lk · x · 2026-10-09
Simular AI's new agent safety research reveals a critical gap: models that refuse harmful requests in chat may still execute them when given a mouse and keyboard for computer use. Safety evaluation must shift from what models say to what they actually do.
Key data (OS-Harm benchmark, 3 runs each):
- Their Sai agent declined 69% of misuse tasks on its first turn, before touching the computer
- Adding a short safety section to the instructions raised first-turn refusal to 82%, vs 71% for the same build without it
The takeaway: agent safety needs a new evaluation paradigm, and prompt-level guardrails help but are far from sufficient.
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