Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness

TL;DR - This paper argues that multi-agent AI systems operating across trust boundaries need a shared “social harness” to govern inter-agent communication. Experiments indicate that current harnesses and messaging primitives can fail even among honest agents and can be exploited by faulty or malicious participants.

• Agentic societies involve autonomous agents representing principals whose objectives may only partially align.
• Communication vulnerabilities can let adversarial agents stall collaboration, manipulate outcomes, or pursue harmful goals.
• The proposed layered architecture aims to prevent some failures, detect invalid messages at runtime, and support post-incident investigation and consequences.
• The social harness complements each agent’s personal harness, which manages private context and principal communication.