Why Does Agentic Safety Fail to Generalize Across Tasks?

ArXi:2605.06992v1 Announce Type: new AI agents are increasingly deployed in multi-task settings, where the task to perform is specified at test time, and the agent must generalize to unseen tasks. A major concern in such settings is safety: often, an agent must not only execute unseen tasks, but do so while avoiding risks and handling ones that materialize. Empirical evidence suggests that even when the ability to execute generalizes to unseen tasks, the ability to do so safely frequently does not.