  Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by
applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also
amplify potential risks - such as leaking private data or causing financial
losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating implementing
the tools, setting up the environment for each test scenario manually, and
finding risky cases. As tools and agents become more complex, the high cost of
testing these agents will make it increasingly difficult to find high-stakes,
long-tailed risks. To address these challenges, we introduce ToolEmu: a
framework that uses an LM to emulate tool execution and enables the testing of
LM agents against a diverse range of tools and scenarios, without manual
instantiation. Alongside the emulator, we develop an LM-based automatic safety
evaluator that examines agent failures and quantifies associated risks. We test
both the tool emulator and evaluator through human evaluation and find that
68.8% of failures identified with ToolEmu would be valid real-world agent
failures. Using our curated initial benchmark consisting of 36 high-stakes
tools and 144 test cases, we provide a quantitative risk analysis of current LM
agents and identify numerous failures with potentially severe outcomes.
Notably, even the safest LM agent exhibits such failures 23.9% of the time
according to our evaluator, underscoring the need to develop safer LM agents
for real-world deployment.
