Safety-routing evaluations distort under distribution shift: selection cost can match routing's entire benefit, and an attacker can cut judged recognition by 19.6 points
The work sizes the selection cost of picking the best single model as comparator on the evaluation data in safety-routing benchmarks: 0.003-0.030 of harm under random splits and 0.045-0.113 under held-out categories on HELM Safety, comparable to the whole deficit attributed to routing, rising seven- to ninefold on AgentDojo when suites are held out; scored honestly under shift, routing buys little, and an attacker who knows which model it faces lowers GPT-5.4's judged recognition by 19.6 points.