AI agents need reliability metrics beyond accuracy to ensure safe real-world deployment.
AI agents are increasingly deployed to execute important tasks. While rising accuracy scores on standard benchmarks suggest rapid progress, many agents still continue to fail in practice. This discrepancy highlights a fundamental limitation of current evaluations: compressing agent behavior into a single success metric obscures critical operational flaws. Notably, it ignores whether agents behave consistently across runs, withstand perturbations, fail predictably, or have bounded error severity. Grounded in safety-critical engineering, we provide a holistic performance profile by proposing twelve concrete metrics that decompose agent reliability along four key dimensions: consistency, robustness, predictability, and safety. Evaluating 14 agentic models across two complementary benchmarks, we find that recent capability gains have only yielded small improvements in reliability. By exposing these persistent limitations, our metrics complement traditional evaluations while offering tools for reasoning about how agents perform, degrade, and fail.
AI agent accuracy metrics alone don't measure safety or reliability in real-world deployments.
Agent reliability should be decomposed into four dimensions: consistency, robustness, predictability, and safety.
Safety-critical industries use frameworks beyond performance metrics that AI systems urgently need to adopt.
The script doesn't fully explain how to measure the four reliability dimensions in practice.
Real-world implementation challenges and trade-offs between the four dimensions aren't discussed.
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