Capability Advertisement as a Market for Lemons: A Trust Layer for Heterogeneous Agent Networks
Large language model (LLM) agents have begun to delegate work to one another. Protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the Agent2Agent protocol (A2A) let an agent publish what it can do and let others call it, and public registries of such agents are already appearing. These protocols assume an advertised capability is a static, truthful fact. A real agent is none of these things: its competence is probabilistic, varies with input, drifts when the underlying model is updated, and, because the agent is itself a language model, it can describe itself with complete confidence and be wrong. A caller therefore sees what an agent claims to do, not what it can do, with no principle...
| Authors | Gaurav Naresh Mittal |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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