When Safety Becomes an Attack Surface: Manipulating Abstention in Tool-Using AI Agents

Reported by arXiv cs.CR (Charles Xiao)

Summary by Cyber Security News13 Nov 2026, 06:00 CET

About this summary. This is a short excerpt from the description that arXiv cs.CR published with its article. Cyber Security News did not report or verify the underlying story. Read the original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14864

arXiv:2611.14864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An AI agent's decision not to act can itself become an attack surface. We study warning-induced over-abstention, an availability attack in which adversaries place fabricated risk warnings in low-trust content to prevent legitimate task completion. Our central premise is that safe abstention requires evaluating both the claimed risk and the authority of the evidence supporting it.

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