Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness
Researchers propose a layered 'social harness' to stop malicious AI agents from exploiting inter-agent communication in multi-agent societies.
The paper shows experimentally that in agentic societies—autonomous AI agents coordinating across trust boundaries—even honest, competent agents fail to reach satisfactory outcomes with existing harnesses and messaging primitives. Faulty or malicious agents can stall collaboration, influence outcomes, and pursue harmful goals by exploiting vulnerabilities in communication. The authors propose a layered social harness architecture that prevents classes of failures, enables runtime detection of invalid messages, and supports post-facto investigation and consequences.