English

ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspaces

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-09 v2

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate productivity tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, document management), but evaluating them on live services is risky due to potentially irreversible changes. Existing benchmarks rely on simplified environments and fail to capture realistic, stateful, multi-service workflows. We introduce ClawsBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM agents in realistic productivity settings. It includes five high-fidelity mock services (Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive) with full state management and deterministic snapshot/restore, along with 44 structured tasks covering single-service, cross-service, and safety-critical scenarios. We decompose agent scaffolding into two independent levers (domain skills that inject API knowledge via progressive disclosure, and a meta prompt that coordinates behavior across services) and vary both to measure their separate and combined effects. Experiments across 6 models, 4 agent harnesses, and 33 conditions show that with full scaffolding, agents achieve task success rates of 39-64% but exhibit unsafe action rates of 7-33%. On OpenClaw, the top five models fall within a 10 percentage-point band on task success (53-63%), with unsafe action rates from 7% to 23% and no consistent ordering between the two metrics. We identify eight recurring patterns of unsafe behavior, including multi-step sandbox escalation and silent contract modification. We release the trajectories and future dataset at https://clawsbench.com.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.05172,
  title  = {ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspaces},
  author = {Xiangyi Li and Kyoung Whan Choe and Yimin Liu and Xiaokun Chen and Chujun Tao and Bingran You and Wenbo Chen and Zonglin Di and Jiankai Sun and Shenghan Zheng and Jiajun Bao and Yuanli Wang and Weixiang Yan and Yiyuan Li and Han-chung Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.05172},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 5 figures