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arXiv:2604.05172cs.AI

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

Xiangyi Li, Kyoung Whan Choe, Yimin Liu, Xiaokun Chen, Chujun Tao, Bingran You, Wenbo Chen, Zonglin Di, Jiankai Sun, Shenghan Zheng, Jiajun Bao, Yuanli Wang, Weixiang Yan, Yiyuan Li, Han-chung Lee

Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.

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.

arXiv comments
25 pages, 5 figures
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.AIArtificial Intelligence

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Linked by 1 identifiable commenter in 1 comment across 1 thread, from Apr 2026 to Apr 2026. Found in 1 HN submission from Apr 2026 to Apr 2026. Open submission discussions.

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    • Author here. We built 5 high-fidelity mock Google Workspace + Slack services and ran 7,224 trials across 6 frontier models and 4 agent harnesses. The headline finding that surprised us most: scaffolding (skills + meta prompt) gives a 39-63pp lift, while the top 5 models are…

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