Empty Commitments: When Agents Promise What Their Runtime Cannot Deliver

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 then describe a measurement protocol: follow-up requests run in five setups that add one persistence affordance at a time, with the environment either left implicit or stated.