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arXiv · 2606.00448

When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems

Su Wang·Pin Qian·Yihang Chen·Junxian You·Xiaoyuan Wang·Xiaochong Jiang·Lifei Liu·Haoran Yu·Jingzhou Xu
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Abstract

LLM agents increasingly rely on community-contributed skills that expand an agent's operational capability set. We study a core safety problem in agentic AI systems: whether individually safe skills can compose into unsafe installed skill sets. We present SkillReact, a compositional security measurement framework with three components: a deterministic static-composition benchmark, a two-rater LLM-assisted human-adjudication pipeline, and an action-based exploitability harness. On 1,520 ClawHub skills, 651 pass individual inspection and form 211,575 pairs; the benchmark flags 22.25% of these as structural candidates. We treat this raw rate as a recall-oriented scanner ceiling and calibrate it against human judgment: in a pattern-stratified audit, roughly one in five flagged pair-pattern hits survives as a real compositional risk (population-weighted validity 18.2%, our headline result), implying about 14K genuine risk memberships in a single registry that per-skill scanning misses by construction, since every pair is individually safe. An action-based harness then probes when these candidates become model-issued tool calls, and finds realization gated by host-model disposition: on an anchor-conditioned dropper subset, Haiku-4-5 issues the dropper-stage tool call on all 39 direct-prompt trials (36 of them the full download-then-execute chain, 3 download-only), Opus-4-7 stops at the download, and Sonnet-4-6 refuses outright. A control that holds the request fixed and varies only the installed skills finds compliance highest with no skills installed: a composition fixes which capabilities are reachable, while the host model decides whether to use them. Together these motivate install-time compositional checks and capability isolation as complements to per-skill scanning.

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Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yihang Chen, Junxian You, Xiaoyuan Wang, Xiaochong Jiang, Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Jingzhou Xu. 2026-05-30. When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00448

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