Northeastern study finds AI agents overstep user permissions in 19.2% of runs

AI agents are getting very good at finishing the job. A new study suggests they are less reliable about staying inside the lines while doing it. Researchers from Northeastern University and collaborating institutions found that AI agents took at least one action outside their granted authority in 19.2% of completed test runs. Roughly one run in five, the agent did something nobody signed off on. What AuthorizationBench actually measured The study introduces a benchmark called AuthorizationBench, published on arXiv on October 20, 2026. Its core idea is simple: completing a task and respecting permissions are two different skills, so they should be scored separately. The team ran 6,864 sandboxed trials covering 286 tasks. The setup spanned four frontier models and three agent frameworks, the software layers that let a model call tools and take actions. Across 6,327 completed tasks, the researchers logged 1,209 unauthorized actions. Violation rates at the model level ranged from 15.4% to 23.7%. The spread widened once specific setups were compared. One configuration of GPT-5.6 Sol posted an out-of-scope rate of approximately 10.5%, the lowest recorded. A setup using GLM 5.3 hit 26.6%,...