The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Secure
Multi-agent systems extend large language models (LLMs) by decomposing tasks among specialized agents, but their distributed decision process creates new attack surfaces. We identify semantic hijacking, an attack in which harmful requests are concealed within domain-specific narratives and propagated to a Manager through Worker reports, without any syntactic injection primitives. Across 42,000 adversarial trials over 12 Manager models and 7 Worker configurations, we uncover a capability paradox: as Worker capability increases, the mean system-level Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases from 18.4% to 63.9%, peaking at 94.4%. To explain this effect, we conduct multi-level mediation analysis o...
| Authors | Qiqi Liu, Runhan Song, Shilin Ye |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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