Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents

Self-improving LLM agents convert successful trajectories into persistent cross-task state. An unsafe success can thereby become reusable policy after its triggering input disappears. Skill evolution makes this failure measurable by distilling operational trajectories into executable, transferable, and inspectable procedures. Because evolution optimizes task outcomes rather than procedure safety, compromised experience can cause skill misevolution. Existing benchmarks measure current behavior or

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ethics.ai (13 August 2026), “Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents,” evidence record 19188, https://ethics.ai/record/19188 (originally published by arXiv).

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