Pith Number

pith:TAVMBJ67

pith:2026:TAVMBJ67FGXUIJCE3RAVBUETFQ

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Evaluating Tool Cloning in Agentic-AI Ecosystems

David Jiang, Neil Gong, Taein Kim, Yuepeng Hu, Yuqi Jia

Tool cloning creates widespread hidden duplication across public agent-tool repositories.

arxiv:2605.09817 v2 · 2026-05-10 · cs.SE · cs.CR

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{TAVMBJ67FGXUIJCE3RAVBUETFQ}

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

These results indicate that tool cloning is a pervasive and severe source of hidden duplication in agent-tool ecosystems. They further suggest that agent-tool datasets and benchmarks should account for repository provenance and implementation similarity when measuring tool diversity or constructing evaluation splits.

C2weakest assumption

That lexical and fuzzy-structural similarity metrics, calibrated via manual verification of 100 sampled pairs per ecosystem, reliably distinguish true cloning from independent but coincidentally similar implementations without significant false positives.

C3one line summary

Tool cloning is pervasive in agentic AI ecosystems, with 60% of high-Jaccard and 85% of high-ssdeep similar pairs verified as true clones in a study of over 8,800 repositories.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:03:16.635297Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

982ac0a7df29af442444dc4150d0932c1c57d891023b804bd98d20dd5708539e

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.09817 · arxiv_version: 2605.09817v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.09817 · pith_short_12: TAVMBJ67FGXU · pith_short_16: TAVMBJ67FGXUIJCE · pith_short_8: TAVMBJ67

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/TAVMBJ67FGXUIJCE3RAVBUETFQ \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 982ac0a7df29af442444dc4150d0932c1c57d891023b804bd98d20dd5708539e

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "43eccb701e698e900205c314128c552cd4184a0035606db90dcd108ebbf4a6be",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.CR"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.SE",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-10T23:39:44Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "8d3347556766190236283151325702a0688fb7f608757e33a5b673e84b264f02"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.09817",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}