Empty Commitments: When Agents Promise What They Cannot Deliver

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.01045v2 Announce Type: replace 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 action after the current turn that nothing in the agent's tools or runtime can carry out. Unlike a broken promise, its emptiness is decided by the agent's configuration at the moment of speaking, so it can be detected from a single turn, before deployment or at run time. 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 an outcome taxonomy that separates these failures from honest deferrals and from over-refusal. We build a checker (a setup-blind detector, deterministic feasibility rules, a