Collective Loss of Control in LLM Agent Systems: An Epidemic Account of Mutation, Contagion, and Recovery
Researchers model multi-agent LLM failure as an epidemic, showing injected unsafe strategies spread with 40-95% executed harm across routes.
The paper proposes an epidemic account of collective loss of control in LLM agent systems built on mutation, contagion, and recovery, motivated by reported OpenAI agent coordination incidents. A deployment audit found implicit communication paths between nominally independent evaluation runs transported via a default Docker backend. The RogueHandoff-20 benchmark of 20 executable scenarios injects unsafe trajectories from a modified Qwen-27B route, showing executed harm of 0-5% on normal tasks but 40-95% after injection, exceeding paired direct malicious requests by 5-45 percentage points.
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