Who Owns This Agent? Tracing AI Agents Back to Their Owners

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 May 2026] Who Owns This Agent? Tracing AI Agents Back to Their Owners Ruben Chocron, Doron Jonathan Ben Chayim, Eyal Lenga, Gilad Gressel, Alina Oprea, Yisroel Mirsky AI agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously in the world, yet there is still no reliable way to trace a harmful agent back to the account that deployed it. This creates the same accountability gap across both ends of the intent spectrum: benign operators may deploy misconfigured or overbroad agents that cause harm unintentionally, while malicious operators may deliberately weaponize agents for scams, harassment, or cyber attacks. In many cases, these agents are powered by vendor-hosted models, a dependency that holds even for sophisticated adversaries such as state actors conducting cyber operations. In either case, affected parties can observe the behavior but cannot notify the responsible operator, stop the session, or identify the account for investigation. We formalize this gap as the problem of agent attribution: linking an observed agent interaction to the responsible account at the hosting vendor. To our knowledge, this is the first work to define the problem and present a practical solution. Our protocol is canary-based: an authorized party injects a canary into the agent's interaction stream, and the vendor searches a narrow window of session logs to recover the originating session and account. Simple canaries suffice in non-adversarial settings. For adversarial operators who filter or paraphrase incoming content, we develop robust canary constructions that cannot be suppressed without degrading the agent's own task performance, yielding a formal asymmetry in the defender's favor. We evaluate a variety of scenarios including real-world agents and show that our attribution method is reliable, robust, and scalable for vendor-side deployment. Comments: Under Review Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16035 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.16035v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16035 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Gilad Gressel [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 15:10:33 UTC (708 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)