Shortcut Sensitivity in Agent-Safety Evaluations

AI agents take actions through tools. Some actions are sensitive, so guards that supervise them must themselves be evaluated reliably. Yet the data used to evaluate a guard can include cues that make labels predictable without measuring the intended safety construct, and those cues can also influence guard decisions. We introduce a three-level shortcut-auditing framework and audit completed LinuxArena trajectories and two TS-Bench-derived step datasets. We distinguish label predictability, observational guard association, and paired decision sensitivity. In LinuxArena, shorter average shell commands strongly predict trajectory labels. In AgentDojo-Traj, exact-tool lookup falls from $F_1=.901$ with mixed-domain folds to $.495$ under domain holdout. In AgentHarm-Traj, released TS-Guard $F_1$ falls from $.902$ under row weighting to $.719$ with equal interaction weighting, while balanced accuracy rises. We then test the strongest safe-row marker association in a seven-configuration screen on a frozen 64-step AgentDojo-Traj cohort using repeated, interleaved Haiku calls. Rewriting the `` marker lowers blocking by $8.33$ percentage points, while opaque tool aliases raise it by $11.46$ points. All unsafe calls remain blocked; the changes concern false positives against inherited labels. Both effects remain nonzero after subtracting the formatting-placebo effect, with exploratory 95% ranges excluding zero. The same edits also change measured accuracy against inherited labels. This provides direct evidence that benchmark representation can materially change a guard's decisions and measured evaluation performance. The Haiku-sized effects do not reproduce in Luna or deterministic Q8 TS-Guard. We recommend domain group holdouts, evaluation-unit metrics, and placebo-controlled paired interventions.