Agentic Societies Need a Social Harness

Abstract

An agentic society is a collection of AI agents that coordinate autonomously across trust boundaries on behalf of different principals. We show experimentally that in such societies even honest, competent agents often fail to reach satisfactory outcomes when using current harnesses and messaging primitives; and faulty or malicious agents can completely stall progress, influence outcomes, and pursue harmful goals by exploiting communication vulnerabilities. We argue that agentic societies need a \emph{social harness}. Unlike a \emph{personal harness}, which manages private context and communication with the principal, a social harness manages interactions with other agents. We propose a layered architecture for social harnesses which (i) prevents classes of communication failures outright, (ii) enables agents to detect invalid messages, and (iii) supports post-facto investigation and consequences.