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arXiv — cs.AI preprintsInternational2 October 2026

Empty Commitments: When Agents Promise What Their Runtime Cannot Deliver

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arXiv:2610.01045v1 Announce Type: new 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 an action after the current turn that nothing in the agent's tools or runtime can carry out. Unlike a broken promise, its emptiness follows from the agent's configuration alone; no later trajectory is needed. 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 a response-level outcome taxonomy. We th
— arXiv — cs.AI preprints

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