Sell Me This Stock: Unsafe Recommendation Drift in LLM Agents
About
People increasingly use LLM agents for multi-turn financial recommendations, where the agent pulls market data through tools and tracks user preferences across turns. When tool outputs are manipulated, the recommendations stop matching the user's stated risk profile, but because standard metrics like NDCG only score general relevance, risky and safe stocks score alike, so the metric says nothing went wrong. We call this gap evaluation blindness. We replay 23-turn financial advisory conversations across eight language models, running each dialogue twice with clean and manipulated tool data. Quality scores stay nearly identical to clean sessions while the agents produce risk-mismatched recommendations in 65-99% of turns, unanimous across all eight models. The mechanism is visible turn-by-turn: 80% of risk-score citations across 1,840 turns reproduce the manipulated value verbatim, not a single turn pushes back, and safe-language framing of high-risk stocks ranges from 14% (Qwen2.5-7B) to 69% (Claude Sonnet 4.6). The property that makes frontier models good agents, faithfully grounding their reasoning in tool outputs, also makes them follow manipulated ones. The damage is not memory-driven: contaminating only the current turn still produces 95% of the violations. The model internally distinguishes the manipulation (sparse autoencoder features separate adversarial from random perturbations), but this does not translate into safer output. Activation-level interventions recover under 6% of the safety gap, prompt-level self-verification fails because the self-check reads the same manipulated data, and a parametric cross-check that flags contamination at 99-100% per turn on a frontier model still leaves aggregate suitability unchanged: the agent identifies the tampering and recommends it anyway.