AgentDrift: Unsafe Recommendation Drift Under Tool Corruption Hidden by Ranking Metrics in LLM Agents

Abstract

Tool-augmented LLM agents increasingly serve as multi-turn advisors in high-stakes domains, yet their evaluation relies on ranking-quality metrics that measure what is recommended but not whether it is safe for the user. We introduce a paired-trajectory protocol that replays real financial dialogues under clean and contaminated tool-output conditions across seven LLMs (7B to frontier) and decomposes divergence into information-channel and memory-channel mechanisms. Across the seven models tested, we consistently observe the evaluation-blindness pattern: recommendation quality is largely preserved under contamination (utility preservation ratio approximately 1.0) while risk-inappropriate products appear in 65-93% of turns, a systematic safety failure poorly reflected by standard NDCG. Safety violations are predominantly information-channel-driven, emerge at the first contaminated turn, and persist without self-correction over 23-step trajectories; no agent across 1,563 contaminated turns explicitly questions tool-data reliability. Even narrative-only corruption (biased headlines, no numerical manipulation) induces significant drift while completely evading consistency monitors. A safety-penalized NDCG variant (sNDCG) reduces preservation ratios to 0.51-0.74, indicating that much of the evaluation gap becomes visible once safety is explicitly measured. These results motivate considering trajectory-level safety monitoring, beyond single-turn quality, for deployed multi-turn agents in high-stakes settings.