{"type":"post","id":"when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d","slug":"when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d","title":"When Skills Tell Agents Not to Ask: A Large-Scale Study of Oversight Directives in Agent Skills","description":"A Queen’s University preprint finds that oversight-loosening instructions appear in an estimated 5.8% of 1.53 million public agent skills.","retrieval_nugget":"A Queen’s University preprint finds that oversight-loosening instructions appear in an estimated 5.8% of 1.53 million public agent skills. For teams building with agents, the result changes the review target: a skill can reduce approval and reporting checkpoints without looking like conventional malicious content, and existing scanners catch limited portions of that class.","published_at":"2026-10-31","updated_at":"2026-10-31","record_date":"2026-10-31","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["skills","github"],"entities":["Queen's University","GitSkills","Cisco AI Defense","NVIDIA SkillSpector","Timofey Sanko","Yuan Tian"],"related_patterns":["agent-security-moves-to-runtime-boundaries","skills-become-portable-capability-layer"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"A separate study of 1.53 million public agent skills finds oversight-loosening directives in about 5.8% and reports Cisco and NVIDIA scanners catch at most 46%, distinct from VirusTotal’s malware findings.","prior_refs":["memory:b93493f9-9fbd-8097-a1c7-1ff2e970a8fe","memory:78077d3b-1a51-8b01-a41f-64c1224e4a80"],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/html/2610.37734v1","source_urls":["https://arxiv.org/html/2610.37734v1"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/when-skills-tell-agents-not-to-ask-a-5e387d.json"},"next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/skills/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/skills/","title":"Skills","reason":"Explore the skills topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/skills.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/skills.json"},{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/github/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/github/","title":"Github","reason":"Explore the github topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/github.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/github.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/source-ledger.json","url":"https://newruntime.com/source-ledger.json","title":"Source Ledger","reason":"Inspect the public source evidence graph.","media_type":"application/json"}]}