Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems arXiv:2609.17527v1 (cs) [Submitted on 15 Sep 2026] Title:Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness Authors:Tapan Chugh, Vidushi Singh, Krish Jain, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan View a PDF of the paper titled Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness, by Tapan Chugh and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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. Subjects: Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2609.17527 [cs.MA] (or arXiv:2609.17527v1 [cs.MA] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17527 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Tapan Chugh [view email] [v1] Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:57:27 UTC (722 KB) Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs 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. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)