Trustworthy Agent Network: Trust in Agent Networks Must Be Baked In, Not Bolted On

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 18 May 2026] Trustworthy Agent Network: Trust in Agent Networks Must Be Baked In, Not Bolted On Yixiang Yao, Yuhang Yao, Xinyi Fan, Jiechao Gao, Jie Wang, Minjia Zhang, Srivatsan Ravi, Carlee Joe-Wong The rapid advancement of Large Language Models has given rise to autonomous LLM-based agents capable of complex reasoning and execution. As these agents transition from isolated operation to collaborative ecosystems, we witness the emergence of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) network, a paradigm where heterogeneous agents autonomously coordinate to solve multi-step tasks. While these networks may offer better task performance compared to simply using one agent to complete the entire task, they introduce systemic vulnerabilities, such as adversarial composition, semantic misalignment, and cascading operational failures, that existing agent alignment techniques cannot address. In this vision paper, we argue that the trustworthiness of A2A networks cannot be fully guaranteed via retrofitting on existing protocols that are largely designed for individual agents. Rather, it must be architected from the very beginning of the A2A coordination framework. We present a comprehensive conceptual framework that situates trust in A2A systems through four design pillars. Comments: Accepted by SIGKDD 2026 Blue Sky Ideas Track Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.19035 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.19035v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19035 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yixiang Yao [view email] [v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 18:57:54 UTC (579 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs 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?)