OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution
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?- What makes evolving the benchmark different from evolving the optimizer itself?
- How does controlled utility evolution prevent the evaluator from becoming a new bottleneck?
- How do epoch boundaries preserve self-improvement guarantees across objective changes?
- How does compiling natural language goals into executable code enable objective evolution?
- Can AI systems generate and refine their own objective functions?
- How would a bi-level agent restructure objective functions during discovery?
- Can a progressively stricter evaluator act like a curriculum for improving agents?
- What stops evolved agent behaviors from generalizing beyond specific tasks?
- Why do self-improving agents concentrate progress in the fast non-parametric loop?
- Can self-improving agents become truly autonomous without intrinsic metacognition?
- How can agents evolve their own skills without human input?
- Why does the harness layer accumulate distributed behaviors over time?
- How should versioning and rollback govern the fast scaffold update loop?
- What makes behavior localization the bottleneck in agent harness evolution?