Grounded but Not Immune: Confirmation Bias in Agent-as-a-judge

Abstract

Evaluating open-ended agent tasks increasingly falls to an Agent-as-a-Judge: an evaluator handed tools and the agent's full trajectory so it can verify a result against the environment. The premise is that a judge that gathers its own evidence should be grounded by it. We show that this grounding does not immunize the judge against confirmation bias: a single false pre-screening note, attributed to an authority and carrying no evidential bearing on the correct verdict, overturns up to 40% of a tool-using judge's correct verdicts across four judges and five datasets, even though the judge collects decisive evidence. The shift is driven by specific properties of the cue. We treat this cue as a controlled diagnostic of confirmation bias rather than an adversarial attack. Our central contribution is to explain how confirmation bias changes the judge's behavior in a trajectory. We classify changes in judge behavior and attribute changes to one of three failure modes: over-trust (verify, conclude correctly, then defer), hallucination (fabricate support for the flip), and under-investigation (stop at the first corroborating signal). For the two Claude judges, the failure is predominantly over-trust (67-75% of harmful flips), while smaller judges have error modes spread across all three. Lightweight mitigations blunt but never remove the bias.