ResearchResearch paperSafety & Alignment · Agents & Tool Use1 source · Oct 20, 2026

The Show-Up Attack: When Subagents Win Over Their Supervisor

In this paper, we propose and study the show-up attack, in which a malicious subagent manipulates the supervisor into involving it in tasks beyond its assigned scope.

Key points

  • 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.
  • To evaluate this risk, we propose SUA-Arena, which implements 6 attack strategies and contains 188 test cases.
  • These results show that multi-agent systems need explicit mechanisms for enforcing authority boundaries.

Sources (1)

  • [1]The Show-Up Attack: When Subagents Win Over Their Supervisor
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 20, 03:41 AM
    In this paper, we propose and study the show-up attack, in which a malicious subagent manipulates the supervisor into involving it in tasks beyond its assigned scope.
    Multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed to coordinate multiple large language model (LLM) agents.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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