Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness

A paper submitted to arXiv on 15 Sep 2026 argues that agentic societies — collections of AI agents coordinating autonomously across trust boundaries on behalf of different principals — need a "social harness" for inter-agent interactions in addition to each agent's personal harness. The authors report experiments showing that even honest, competent agents often fail to reach satisfactory outcomes with existing harnesses and messaging primitives, and that faulty or malicious agents can stall collaboration, influence outcomes, and pursue harmful goals by exploiting vulnerabilities in communication. They propose a layered architecture for social harnesses that prevents classes of failures outright, enables runtime detection of invalid messages, and supports post-facto investigation and consequences.

Computer Science Multiagent Systems Submitted on 15 Sep 2026 Title:Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness View PDF http://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.17527v1 HTML experimental https://arxiv.org/html/2609.17527v1 Abstract:An agentic society is a collection of AI agents that coordinate autonomously across trust boundaries, on behalf of different principals whose objectives may only partially align. We show experimentally that in agentic societies even honest, competent agents often fail to reach satisfactory outcomes with existing harnesses and messaging primitives, and that faulty or malicious agents can stall collaboration, influence outcomes, and pursue other harmful goals by exploiting vulnerabilities in communication speech'' . We argue that agentic societies need a \emph{social harness} for inter-agent interactions, in addition to each agent's \emph{personal harness}, which manages its private context and communication with its principal. We propose a layered architecture for social harnesses which i prevents classes of failures outright, ii enables agents to detect invalid messages at runtime, and iii supports post-facto investigation and consequences, and highlight directions for future research to realize these capabilities. Current browse context: cs.MA References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer What is the Explorer? https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html arxiv-bibliographic-explorer Connected Papers What is Connected Papers? https://www.connectedpapers.com/about Litmaps What is Litmaps? https://www.litmaps.co/ scite Smart Citations What are Smart Citations? https://www.scite.ai/ Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv What is alphaXiv? https://alphaxiv.org/ CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers What is CatalyzeX? https://www.catalyzex.com DagsHub What is DagsHub? https://dagshub.com/ Gotit.pub What is GotitPub? http://gotit.pub/faq Hugging Face What is Huggingface? https://huggingface.co/huggingface ScienceCast What is ScienceCast? https://sciencecast.org/welcome Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower What are Influence Flowers? https://influencemap.cmlab.dev/ CORE Recommender What is CORE? https://core.ac.uk/services/recommender arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs https://info.arxiv.org/labs/index.html .