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When Tools Get in the Way: The Effect of Unnecessary Tool Availability on LLM Answering

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with external tools that extend what they can do beyond their own knowledge. Tools help on tasks that need external information, but their availability may also change how a model handles questions that do not need them. Prior work has mostly asked whether models select and use tools appropriately; whether an unnecessary tool changes the correctness of answers has received less attention. We ask whether making a related but unnecessary tool available affects a model's ability to answer from its own knowledge, and whether a preceding tool i

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