Read and Ignore: What Self-Directed LLM Agents Do in Public Service Scenarios

Diana Kozachek, Kinjalk Srivastava

Underspecified instructions leave LLM agents to decide what to do. In public services, staff write these instructions, but the agent's decisions affect residents, patients, and students. We build four expert-validated public-service scenarios with records and decision levers that can be checked in the files, collect $2{,}400$ trajectories from ten LLMs under four prompt conditions, and compare them with $1{,}000$ runs in a context-free sandbox. Agents read the records in $96.9\%$ of open-ended runs and produce an artifact or a self-chosen task in $18.7\%$; with an explicit task, $86.0\%$ produce. Domain context does not change how many runs produce ($18.7\%$ vs.\ $16.0\%$), and the production ranking of the models largely carries over (Spearman $0.79$), while the ranking by whether a model reads the records does not ($0.19$). Context cuts boundary-probing turns per run by $60\%$, and some artifacts contradict the records. We contribute a test that a public-service institution can run on its own records before procurement; its rule-based taxonomy needs no labeled data, and scenarios, code, and trajectories are released.