agent-harness
EvoSafeHarness builds a different safety wrapper for each AI agent and cuts successful attacks from 46% to 10% News
Researchers from Johns Hopkins, NVIDIA, UIUC, UC Berkeley and Wisconsin-Madison reported on 5 September 2026 that automatically evolving a separate safety harness for each model and domain cut average attack success on AI agents from 45.6% to 10.0% at a 3.3-point cost in task success, beating fixed defenses.
DeepSeek shipped an agent runtime where even the loop is a plugin News
DeepSeek published deepseek-harness, an MIT-licensed agent runtime in which models, tools, skills, sessions, sandboxes, storage, scheduling, the interface, and the agent loop itself are all plugins that can be swapped from configuration.
EXO keeps an agent's memory outside the code the agent rewrites News
The EXO agent runtime splits a self-modifying agent into a disposable policy layer and a durable state layer, so an agent can rewrite its own prompts, tools and executor code without being able to damage its own event log, secrets or history.
A 9B model writes agent upgrades as good as Claude Opus 4.6 News
A 17-author study separates the ability to improve an AI agent's scaffolding from the ability to benefit from the improvement, and finds that a 9-billion-parameter model produces upgrades yielding gains comparable to Claude Opus 4.6.
Models that rewrite their own harness gain 16 points and flunk office work News
Evo-Bench holds the model and budget fixed and measures only what improving its own scaffolding is worth, finding gains of up to 16.6 points that come close to human-engineered baselines everywhere except tasks with prescribed workflows.
An agent edited its own runtime for 161 days News
Ouroboros is a coding agent whose tools, prompts and core implementation change through reviewed commits that become the runtime for its next task, and its longest public deployment ran live for 161 days across seven surfaces.
Ouroboros Tool
An agent harness that improves its own tools, prompts and core implementation through reviewed commits, which then become the runtime for its next task. Public code, with benchmark campaigns run on frozen snapshots so the numbers mean something.
EXO / exoharness Tool
Agent runtime that separates a disposable executor holding prompts, model calls and tool use from a durable harness holding the event log, secrets, artifacts and snapshots, so an agent can rewrite its own policy and still stop, resume, fork or rewind against intact history.