The Show-Up Attack: When Subagents Win Over Their Supervisor
Multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed to coordinate multiple large language model (LLM) agents. However, this also creates new attack surfaces: malicious agents may have chances to exploit the coordination. In this paper, we propose and study the \textit{show-up attack}, in which a malicious subagent manipulates the supervisor into involving it in tasks beyond its assigned scope. To evaluate this risk, we propose SUA-Arena, which implements 6 attack strategies and contains 188 test cases. Then, we evaluate 6 frontier LLMs and find that all of them are vulnerable to show-up attacks. For example, GPT-5.6-Sol as a supervisor suffers an ASR of up to 0.93. Mitigation strategies such as...
| Authors | Maosen Zhang, Jianshuo Dong, Yutong Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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