Towards a Science of AI Agent Reliability
AI agents are getting smarter, but are they getting more reliable? Not really.
The paper shows a worrying gap: while accuracy on benchmarks keeps rising, reliability lags far behind.
The authors propose a safety‑critical engineering lens for agents, breaking reliability into four dimensions:
- Consistency – do they give the same result every time?
- Robustness – can they handle rephrased prompts or API glitches?
- Predictability – do they know when they’re about to fail?
- Safety – how bad are the failures when they happen?
The takeaway: accuracy alone is not enough. If we want agents that can be trusted to act autonomously, we need to evaluate—and design for—reliability as a separate, measurable property.
March 20, 2026 225 6
