EEFA: A Framework for the Ethical Evaluation of AI Agents

arXiv:2611.02561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid deployment of autonomous AI agents across consequential domains including healthcare, legal services, nancial management, and enterprise workows has created an urgent governance challenge. While the eld of AI evaluation has produced sophisticated benchmarks for measuring agent capability, these frameworks measure exclusively what agents can do rather than how they do it. The ethical dimensions most critical to responsible agent deployment, in- cluding respect for human autonomy, harm avoidance, transparency and non-deception, privacy compliance, and accountability, are systematically absent from current evaluation practice. This paper addresses that gap through three contributions. First, a structured literature review of twelve leading AI agent benchmarks characterizes the ethical dimensions those bench- marks do and do not measure. Second, the Ethical Evaluation Framework for AI Agents (EEFA) is introduced as a comprehensive, operationalizable instrument for ethical agent evaluation, grounded in established AI ethics principles and designed for use by developers, auditors, and regulators. Third, a reproducible validation protocol is specied for applying the EEFA to deployed agent systems, with illustrative test scenarios across all ve framework dimensions. The EEFA is organized across ve primary dimensions: Autonomy Preservation, Harm Avoid- ance, Transparency and Non-Deception, Privacy Compliance, and Accountability and Traceabil- ity. The framework maps directly onto the requirements of the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, positioning it as a practical compliance assessment instrument for high-risk AI applications. Empirical application of the framework across diverse benchmarks and agent systems is identied as a priority direction for future work.