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One 2026 study found that a particular way of describing tools to AI agents—schema-formatted specifications—may weaken refusal signals and contribute to unsafe tool execution. The authors’ proposed defense, SafeKeep, separates the format used to assess a request from the schema used to execute an approved tool call. The finding concerns the tested models and benchmarks; it does not show that all tool-using agents become less safe.
Why might AI agents become less safe when using tools?
In a paper submitted to arXiv on July 31, 2026, Minghui Pan, Jiayuxuan Yang, Yuanyuan Yuan, Yu Jiang, and Zhenpeng Chen identify schema-formatted tool specifications as a source of safety degradation in the agent setups they studied. A tool specification describes what a tool does and how an agent should call it, often using structured fields and parameters.
The authors say their white-box representation analysis found that these schema-formatted descriptions weakened the models’ internal refusal signals and contributed to unsafe tool execution. In other words, the paper’s concern is not simply that an agent has tools; it is that the format used to present tool instructions may affect how the model handles harmful requests. The authors describe the finding in the paper abstract.
What is SafeKeep, and how does it work?
SafeKeep is the authors’ proposed approach to separating safety assessment from tool execution. It assesses a request using a flattened, textual version of the tool specifications, while retaining the original schema-formatted specifications for executing tools. The distinction is between the representation used to judge a request and the representation used to make a tool call—not between allowing and removing tools.
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The paper’s abstract says SafeKeep was evaluated on two representative benchmarks and four large language models, including both white-box and black-box models. It reports that the method preserved task-handling capability, but the abstract alone does not provide enough detail to assess the exact task measures or how well the approach compares across particular models and benchmarks.
What results did the paper report?
Across the paper’s reported evaluation, Pan and co-authors say SafeKeep raised the average refusal rate for harmful requests from 23.8% to 70.6%. They also report reducing average attack success under observation-level prompt injection from 25.6% to 2.5%.
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These figures describe the study’s tested models and benchmarks, as reported in the 2026 paper—not expected results for every deployed agent. The abstract does not establish that SafeKeep guarantees safety, nor does it justify assuming the same changes in a different tool setup or deployment.
What does this finding not establish?
- It does not show that every tool or every tool-using AI agent makes a system less safe. The paper focuses on schema-formatted tool specifications in its tested setup.
- It does not establish that the reported improvements will transfer to all models, benchmarks, tool formats, or real-world deployments.
- The abstract does not name the evaluated models or benchmarks, provide detailed experimental breakdowns, or establish statistical significance. Those specifics should not be inferred from the headline results.
- The reported results are from the paper’s evaluation; the available sources do not establish an independent replication of this particular study.
How does the finding relate to practical agent security?
Tool-description format is one issue; deployment controls address other ways an agent can cause harm. In a separate practitioner article, NVIDIA AI Red Team authors Rich Harang and Becca Lynch describe recurring risks observed in their assessments: inadequate access controls, tools that permit arbitrary code execution, missing network egress controls, and plaintext secrets exposed to the agent. Their recommendations include restricting access, sandboxing execution, denying network egress by default, and keeping secrets out of the agent’s reach. These are deployment recommendations, not the mechanism tested in the SafeKeep paper. See NVIDIA’s agent-security guidance.
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NVIDIA also announced its Open Agent Safety Platform on September 28, 2026, describing OpenShell software and a Sentry reference system design for governance and control across agent software, compute, hardware, and robotics. That company announcement is separate context; it is not an evaluation of SafeKeep or evidence that the paper’s method is part of the platform. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said, “Safety and security require full-stack engineering.” The announcement is available from the NVIDIA Newsroom.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What should developers take away?
The study makes tool specifications a safety question worth testing: an agent’s behavior may depend not only on which tools it can call, but also on how their instructions are represented. SafeKeep offers one proposed design—use flattened text for safety assessment while retaining schemas for execution—and reports promising results in a bounded evaluation. Developers should treat those results as evidence to investigate, not as a substitute for testing their own models, tools, and defenses.
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