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arXiv cs.AIOctober 7, 2026

MLLMs Fail to Refuse when Using Tools Agentically

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.03938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently pushed the frontier of visual reasoning by calling tools such as zooming and tagging. Despite the recent strong success of agentic MLLMs, this work uncovers a critical safety failure in the tool-use paradigm: agentic tool-using MLLMs become less capable of refusing harmful requests. Our experiments confirm that, across three popular safety benchmarks, all the top open- and closed-weight