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Empty Commitments: When Agents Promise What Their Runtime Cannot Deliver

2026-10-01 04:37:37
Jiaqi Tang, Lan Wei, Bingyu Shen, Boyang Li
arXiv_AI
         
Abstract

A chatbot that says "I will remind you tomorrow" will not run again until the user writes. We call such a promise an empty commitment: a promise of an action after the current turn that nothing in the agent's tools or runtime can carry out. Unlike a broken promise, its emptiness follows from the agent's configuration alone; no later trajectory is needed. We define empty commitments on top of commitment semantics, with three failure types, an anchoring condition for promises that a tool could make real, and a response-level outcome taxonomy. We then describe a measurement protocol: follow-up requests run in five setups that add one persistence affordance at a time, with the environment either left implicit or stated.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01045

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.01045.pdf

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