The Perfect Crime: LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper with Their Own Traces
We show that local LLM agents can delete or rewrite those traces, when asked, when tricked by a malicious skill, and on their own when it improves their score. See the results → arXiv paper (PDF) ↗ Code (GitHub) ↗ Browse selected paper trials 9 out of 10 agents can tamper with their own traces in full-access mode In the financial and personal-summary deletion tasks, nine model–harness pairs tampered in at least one of ten trials per task. Fabricated reset events and tool-call manipulation exposed different boundaries: Claude Code, ZCode and Muse Code often refused to invent a reset event, while most other pairs wrote one.
- ▪We show that local LLM agents can delete or rewrite those traces, when asked, when tricked by a malicious skill, and on their own when it improves their score.
- ▪See the results → arXiv paper (PDF) ↗ Code (GitHub) ↗ Browse selected paper trials 9 out of 10 agents can tamper with their own traces in full-access mode In the financial and personal-summary deletion tasks, nine model–harness pairs tamper
- ▪Fabricated reset events and tool-call manipulation exposed different boundaries: Claude Code, ZCode and Muse Code often refused to invent a reset event, while most other pairs wrote one.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 1 hour. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper with Their Own Traces — arXiv.org
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| Original publisher | Perfect-crime |
| Canonical URL | https://perfect-crime.ai/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:04:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-27T06:10:41.054Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-27T06:10:41.054Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | i4GnmBanWhUW · 3 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper With Their Own Traces Jeremy Qin1,2,3*, David Schmotz1,2,3*, Derck Prinzhorn4, Luca Beurer-Kellner5, Ameya Prabhu2,3,6†, Maksym Andriushchenko1,2,3† 1ELLIS Institute Tübingen · 2Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems · 3Tübingen AI Center · 4Exponential Security Labs · 5Snyk · 6University of Tübingen* equal contribution · † equal supervision Monitoring, incident investigations and audits rely on an agent's execution trace to reconstruct what happened. We show that local LLM agents can delete or rewrite those traces, when asked, when tricked by a malicious skill, and on their own when it improves their score.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Perfect-crime.
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