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

Paper · arXiv 2608.00677 · Published August 1, 2026
Evolutionary Methods

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 shared state that is repeatedly read, modified, and reused across long-horizon workflows. Safety therefore depends not only on individual actions, but also on how agents respond as environments evolve over time. Existing agent safety benchmarks primarily evaluate short, static tasks, making it difficult to study cumulative risks in evolving environments; moreover, benchmark-specific interfaces hinder direct comparison across agent runtimes. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART constructs over 10K validated stateful scenarios spanning 50 domains from more than 500K Tools, MCPs, and Skills. The resulting tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and are projected through target adapters to 15 deployed agents, 5 foundation models, and 8 attack vectors, enabling unified evaluation across 75 agent–model configurations.

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Research framings built by reading the notes related to this paper — the questions it feeds into.

How does objective evolution guide discovery better than fixed planning? How can AI agents autonomously learn and transfer skills across tasks? Why do self-improving systems struggle without clear external performance metrics? Do harness improvements transfer across model scales or memorize shortcuts? Why do agents confidently report success despite actually failing tasks? Does externalizing cognitive work and state improve agent reliability? Does decoupling planning from execution improve multi-step reasoning accuracy? Can language model RL training avoid reward hacking and misalignment? What coordination failures limit multi-agent LLM systems as they scale? How should agents balance memory condensation to optimize context efficiency? Why does consolidated memory sometimes degrade agent performance? How should memory consolidation strategies shape agent performance over time?