Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes 40 safety benchmarks for AI agents, revealing methodological inconsistencies, coverage gaps, and the impact of evaluation choices on safety conclusions.

Contribution

It introduces a six-axis taxonomy for benchmark evaluation, catalogs existing benchmarks, and proposes standards to improve consistency and coverage in AI safety assessment.

Findings

Benchmark choice can lead to contradictory safety conclusions.

Coverage counts often overstate evaluation depth.

Environment fidelity influences safety reporting.

Abstract

The rapid deployment of LLM-based autonomous agents has introduced safety risks that extend far beyond traditional LLM concerns, prompting a proliferation of safety benchmarks since late 2023. However, these benchmarks have developed independently, with inconsistent threat models, incompatible metrics, and overlapping yet incomplete risk coverage. We present the first systematic analysis dedicated to agent safety benchmarks as evaluation instruments. We catalog 40 behavioral agent-safety benchmarks (2023-2026), plus 5 adjacent evaluator, defense, and dataset artifacts, propose a six-axis taxonomy of benchmark evaluation methodology, and apply it across the corpus to characterize how methodological choices shape safety conclusions. A coverage matrix reveals broad risk coverage but limited methodological convergence, while the taxonomy analysis shows a behavioral-benchmark core concentrated in sandboxed, constrained, and often safety-only evaluation. Across the landscape, we find that benchmark choice can yield contradictory safety conclusions, coverage counts often overstate evaluation depth, environment fidelity systematically shapes reported safety, the field disproportionately tests externally imposed rather than agent-internal risks, metric fragmentation limits comparison, and robustness remains effectively unbenchmarked. We ground these claims with a cross-benchmark consistency check, with 95% confidence intervals and Kendall's W concordance analysis, finding no evidence of ranking concordance across evaluation dimensions (W = 0.10, p = 0.94). We release structured metadata, full taxonomy codings, risk annotations, and all experimental artifacts, and propose minimum reporting standards for future benchmarks.