WIRE: Profiling Witnessed Within-Policy Instruction Collisions in LLM Agents

Abstract

LLM agents are governed by long-lived prompt policies, where individually reasonable stand- ing rules can jointly govern the same pre- generation state. Existing instruction-following evaluations usually ask whether a model satis- fies explicit constraints, but they do not show how a model resolves pressure among rules inside one standing policy. We introduce WIRE, a witnessed resolu- tion profiler for prompt policies. WIRE ex- tracts source-grounded rules, encodes them as PYRULE clauses, uses satisfiability checks only to nominate same-surface hard-collision can- didates, realizes those candidates as concrete co-governance witnesses, and executes subject models to produce a four-cell resolution profile: satisfy both rules, only the earlier rule, only the later rule, or neither. Across six public prompt policies, WIRE ex- tracts 276 source rules and 560 clauses, clas- sifies 30,944 within-policy clause-pair com- parisons, retains 170 encoded hard-collision source-rule pairs, and realizes 1,402 concrete witnesses. In policy-only evaluation, these wit- nesses yield 13,335 jointly governed, judgeable trials; only 35.4% satisfy both governed rules. The resulting profiles reveal policy-specific, model-specific, and tool-interface-specific res- olution patterns. WIRE is not a proof of natural-language contra- diction, a deployment-frequency estimator, or a root-cause diagnosis. It is a measurement tool that returns reproducible witnesses and aggre- gate profiles for inspection, regression testing, and repair.