Agent tools can fail silently before outputs look valid
A ToolUniverse audit found 91 silent failures across 15 scientific tools, meaning an agent can receive incomplete or missing information while the invocation still appears successful. The failures were concentrated in the API layer (51) and wrapper layer (25), especially missing fields and inconsistent search, filtering, or ranking. The paper proposes testing, disclosure, monitoring, and “contextual reliability” measures for catching errors before they propagate into scientific outputs.