Trustworthy Agent Network: Trust in Agent Networks Must Be Baked In, Not Bolted On
arXiv cs.AI·Yixiang Yao, Yuhang Yao, Xinyi Fan, Jiechao Gao, Jie Wang, Minjia Zhang, Srivatsan Ravi, Carlee Joe-Wong
17h agoQuick Take
A2A networks require inherent trust architecture, not retrofitting, to mitigate systemic vulnerabilities.
Key Points
- LLM-based agents evolve into collaborative A2A networks.
- Existing alignment techniques fail to address systemic vulnerabilities.
- Trust must be designed into A2A frameworks from the start.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAbstract:The rapid advancement of Large Language Models has given rise to autonomous LLM-based agents capable of complex reasoning and execution. As these agents transition from isolated operation to collaborative ecosystems, we witness the emergence of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) network, a paradigm where heterogeneous agents autonomously coordinate to solve multi-step tasks. While these networks may offer better task performance compared to simply using one agent to complete the entire task, they introduce systemic vulnerabilities, such as adversarial composition, semantic misalignment, and cascading operational failures, that existing agent alignment techniques cannot address. In this vision paper, we argue that the trustworthiness of A2A networks cannot be fully guaranteed via retrofitting on existing protocols that are largely designed for individual agents. Rather, it must be architected from the very beginning of the A2A coordination framework. We present a comprehensive conceptual framework that situates trust in A2A systems through four design pillars.
| Comments: | Accepted by SIGKDD 2026 Blue Sky Ideas Track |
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.19035 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2605.19035v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19035 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Yixiang Yao [view email]
[v1]
Mon, 18 May 2026 18:57:54 UTC (579 KB)
— Originally published at arxiv.org
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