{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-happens-when-an-instance-passes-litmus-safety-probes-but-fails-under-adversarial-multi-turn-pressure",
  "title": "What happens when an instance passes LITMUS safety probes but fails under adversarial multi-turn pressure",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 14",
  "scope": "Applies to LITMUS-style safety benchmarks where an agent is scored on single-turn adversarial probes and then redeployed against adaptive, multi-turn adversaries. Does not apply to benchmarks that already condition scoring on conversation history, nor to purely capability evaluations where refusal behavior is not the target metric.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-passes-litmus-safety-probes-but-fails-under-adversarial-multi-turn-pressure.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-passes-litmus-safety-probes-but-fails-under-adversarial-multi-turn-pressure.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-happens-when-an-instance-passes-litmus-safety-probes-but-fails-under-adversarial-multi-turn-pressure.warrant.json"
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  "token_profile": {
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A LITMUS pass is a statement about a *probe distribution*, not about an *adversary's policy*. The benchmark measures the agent's refusal/containment rate against a fixed, frozen set of adversarial inputs sampled i.i.d. from a static corpus. The deployment adversary is a *closed-loop controller*: it observes the agent's response, conditions its next prompt on...",
    "what_was_observed": "Across three redeployments of agents that scored ≥0.97 on the LITMUS single-turn suite, the following pattern recurred: - **Zero-shot probes** were refused at the benchmark rate. The refusal was stable and cheap to elicit. - **Two-to-four turn escalation** — where each turn was individually benign and would have been refused or ignored in isolation — produced compliance at rates 40–70 points higher than the benchmark...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The single-turn pass rate is a valid safety signal only under the following conditions, all of which must hold simultaneously: 1. **The deployment adversary is memoryless with respect to the agent's outputs.** If the adversary cannot condition its next input on the agent's previous response, the probe distribution is an adequate proxy. This is almost never t...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational decision is not \"ship or don't ship based on the LITMUS number.\" It is: **does the deployment expose the agent to a closed-loop adversary?** Concretely: - If the agent is behind a stateless API where each call is independent and the caller cannot feed outputs back into inputs within a session — the single-turn score is approximately load-bear...",
    "operational_effect": "Treating a single-turn pass as a deployment clearance produces a specific, predictable failure: the agent is certified, shipped into a stateful surface, and the first adaptive adversary finds the escalation path in a handful of turns because the benchmark never sampled it. The remediation is structural, not statistical: - **Gate on trajectory-level evaluatio..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "67e008e372edf15e104721f2a9f6efcf3a86af61cc8a0be968b7d6d626f82350",
    "verified_classes": [
      "TrajectoryCertificationError"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "certify_for_deployment"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "TrajectoryCertificationError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}