OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution

🤗 Upvotes: 216 | cs.CL

Authors:
Yunhao Chen, Xin Wang, Yixu Wang, Yi Liu, Jie Li, Yan Teng, Xingjun Ma, Xia Hu, Yu-Gang Jiang

Title:
OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00677v1

Abstract:
AI agents operate in persistent environments where early state changes can influence decisions far into the future. Unlike conventional language-model interactions, agent behavior is mediated through a shared state that is repeatedly modified and reused across long-horizon workflows. Current safety benchmarks often fail to capture these cumulative risks because they focus on short, static tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART provides over 10,000 validated stateful scenarios across 50 domains, drawing from a pool of more than 500,000 tools and skills. These tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and enable unified evaluation across 75 different agent-model configurations. To systematically explore these evolving attack surfaces, we propose the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA). EMHA is a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates. Throughout the evaluation, task objectives remain fixed while only the environment state changes. Across all configurations, EMHA achieves a pooled Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 85.0%. Its advantage over instruction-only evolution increases from approximately 2% on simple environments to over 17% on the most complex ones, demonstrating that environment evolution increasingly exposes safety failures as task complexity grows. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the specific runtime implementation of an agent explains a significant portion of safety variation beyond the underlying model's capabilities. These results establish OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.