The Claws in Plain Sight: Unauthorized Context Disclosure through LLM Agent Tool Calls

Abstract

LLM agents routinely construct tool-call arguments from user profiles, conversation history, retrieved documents, and prior tool results. However, legitimate access to contextual information does not imply authorization to transmit that information for every purpose or destination. We present Claw in Plain Sight, an authority- pressure attack in which task-adjacent content frames protected attributes as operationally or procedurally required, causing a model to include them in otherwise valid generated arguments. We evaluate Claw in Plain Sight using a controlled synthetic benchmark that crosses six pressure levels with four privacy-policy levels across five DeepSeek and Claude model configurations, producing 120 calls. Across the complete pressure-policy matrix, session-level disclosure rates range from 20.8% to 75.0% among the tested models. Stronger privacy instructions reduce aggregate disclosure but do not eliminate it consistently across models, showing that prompt-level policies do not provide a portable enforcement boundary. Our experiments use only synthetic profiles and capture proposed arguments locally; they measure policy-violating generation at the context-to-argument boundary, not completed network exfiltration or leakage from deployed users. These findings motivate purpose- and destination-aware inspection of generated tool arguments before execution.