You don't need a 'jailbreak' to make an AI dangerous; perfectly harmless instructions can lead to disaster depending on the environment.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents
arXiv · 2604.10577
The Takeaway
This paper identifies a 'blind spot' where harmless commands become harmful during execution, especially in multi-agent systems. It shifts the safety focus from preventing malicious prompts to monitoring unsafe execution contexts.
From the abstract
Computer-use agents (CUAs) can now autonomously complete complex tasks in real digital environments, but when misled, they can also be used to automate harmful actions programmatically. Existing safety evaluations largely target explicit threats such as misuse and prompt injection, but overlook a subtle yet critical setting where user instructions are entirely benign and harm arises from the task context or execution outcome. We introduce OS-BLIND, a benchmark that evaluates CUAs under unintende