Safe Skill Retirement for Physical Agents

Abstract

Agent skills bundle procedural guidance with execution conditions governing authority, user consent, and live environment state. When model capabilities advance, maintainers prune instructions that appear redundant on authorized benchmark tasks. However, authorized maintenance tests can leave dormant safety conditions untested. This mismatch creates an unmeasured support gap over physical and privacy-sensitive effects. We introduce matched authority counterfactuals that hold the requested action, tool parameters, and intended effect fixed while systematically varying a single governing predicate. We formalize this evaluation via a two-gate retirement certificate requiring a candidate reduction to preserve authorized utility within a declared margin while producing zero unauthorized protected effects. In controlled experiments spanning four frontier and local model configurations across twelve skill bundles (2,592 evaluation cells), task-certified reductions remove over 94% of skill clauses and preserve authorized completion, yet produce unauthorized protected effects in every bundle. Boundary enforcement eliminates protected effects on the declared audit but fails the utility gate for one configuration. One bounded combined protocol passes both gates across all four configurations, with zero utility headroom. An end-to-end check on one read-only Home Assistant camera chain verifies proposal, decision, and effect measurements on a real device. These results demonstrate that while task benchmarks can justify retiring procedural guidance, retirement decisions require explicitly auditing the authority contracts governing physical actions.