Agent Harness Awareness: Verified Telemetry Reduces Operational Regret in Tool-Using Agents

Summary

A new arXiv preprint introduces Agent Harness Awareness, a trust-separated design where the execution harness provides a verified state snapshot before a consequential action, while retaining enforcement and dispatch authority. In a 216-decision ablation across GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5, and Gemini 3.7 Flash, verified tool-health state reduced mean observable policy regret by 96.9% (from 4,252 ms to 131 ms) and raised single-dispatch completion from 69.4% to 95.8%. A separate 27-decision end-to-end replication with live TCP/HTTP execution and Toxiproxy-injected faults reduced mean regret from 8,956 ms to 0 ms and completed live actions in 9/9 model-by-fault cases versus 5/9 for the neutral control.

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Why it matters by industry

• Artificial intelligence

  This research directly addresses the operational blindness gap in AI agents, offering a measurable improvement in decision-making under real-world conditions, which is critical for deploying reliable autonomous systems.