ResearchResearch paperSafety & Alignment1 source · Oct 8, 2026

Safe Actions Alone Do Not Ensure Safe Agents: Identifying Unfulfilled Obligations with Guard Models

In this paper, we argue that agent safety also depends on identifying required yet unperformed safety-critical actions, which we call obligations.

Key points

  • Guard models are increasingly used to safeguard LLM-based agents, primarily by identifying actions that agents are forbidden to perform.
  • However, identifying forbidden actions alone is insufficient to ensure agent safety.
  • To close this gap, we introduce ObligationBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the capability of obligation identification, comprising 240 expert-validated trajectories covering issue resolution, feature development, and terminal operations.
  • To address these limitations, we develop ObligationGuard using 40,000 synthetic training examples.

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