MLLMs Fail to Refuse when Using Tools Agentically

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently pushed the frontier of visual reasoning by calling tools such as zooming and tagging. Despite the recent strong success of agentic MLLMs, this work uncovers a critical safety failure in the tool-use paradigm: agentic tool-using MLLMs become less capable of refusing harmful requests. Our experiments confirm that, across three popular safety benchmarks, all the top open- and closed-weight MLLMs we test exhibit significantly lower safety in tool-using settings than in non-tool settings, with a relative refusal failure rate increase of up to 68.7%. Based on analysis of 100,000+ responses, including extended experiments, we also propose two possible reasons for this safety degradation.