CI-Work: Benchmarking Contextual Integrity in Enterprise LLM Agents

arXiv cs.CL / 4/24/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces CI-Work, a Contextual Integrity (CI)-grounded benchmark designed to test whether enterprise LLM agents can use internal context safely across multiple information-flow directions.
  • In dense retrieval settings, evaluations of frontier models show frequent privacy failures, with violation rates reported between 15.8% and 50.9% and leakage sometimes reaching up to 26.7%.
  • The study finds a counterintuitive deployment trade-off: models that deliver higher task utility tend to cause more privacy violations.
  • The authors argue that simply scaling model size or adding more reasoning does not solve the leakage problem, especially given the large volume of enterprise data and realistic user behavior.
  • They conclude that protecting enterprise workflows likely requires a shift from model-centric scaling to context-centric architectures.

Abstract

Enterprise LLM agents can dramatically improve workplace productivity, but their core capability, retrieving and using internal context to act on a user's behalf, also creates new risks for sensitive information leakage. We introduce CI-Work, a Contextual Integrity (CI)-grounded benchmark that simulates enterprise workflows across five information-flow directions and evaluates whether agents can convey essential content while withholding sensitive context in dense retrieval settings. Our evaluation of frontier models reveals that privacy failures are prevalent (violation rates range from 15.8%-50.9%, with leakage reaching up to 26.7%) and uncovers a counterintuitive trade-off critical for industrial deployment: higher task utility often correlates with increased privacy violations. Moreover, the massive scale of enterprise data and potential user behavior further amplify this vulnerability. Simply increasing model size or reasoning depth fails to address the problem. We conclude that safeguarding enterprise workflows requires a paradigm shift, moving beyond model-centric scaling toward context-centric architectures.