mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

TAMAS: Benchmarking Adversarial Risks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

arXiv 2511.05269 ↗First posted 7 Nov 2025cs.MA cs.AIcited by 26

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents through tool use, planning, and decision-making abilities, leading to their widespread adoption across diverse tasks. As task complexity grows, multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly used to solve problems collaboratively. However, safety and security of these systems remains largely under-explored. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on single-agent settings, failing to capture the unique vulnerabilities of multi-agent dynamics and co-ordination. To address this gap, we introduce Threats and Attacks in Multi-Agent Systems (TAMAS), a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness and safety of multi-agent LLM systems. TAMAS includes five distinct scenarios comprising 300 adversarial instances across six attack types and 211 tools, along with 100 harmless tasks. We assess system performance across ten backbone LLMs and three agent interaction configurations from Autogen and CrewAI frameworks, highlighting critical challenges and failure modes in current multi-agent deployments. Furthermore, we introduce Effective Robustness Score (ERS) to assess the tradeoff between safety and task effectiveness of these frameworks. Our findings show that multi-agent systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, underscoring the urgent need for stronger defenses. TAMAS provides a foundation for systematically studying and improving the safety of multi-agent LLM systems.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 30 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2025.

Builds on

30 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents6 Mar
  2. 2025Red-Teaming LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Communication Attacks20 Feb
  3. 2024RedCode: Risky Code Execution and Generation Benchmark for Code Agents12 Nov
  4. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
  5. 2024Prompt Infection: LLM-to-LLM Prompt Injection within Multi-Agent Systems9 Oct
  6. 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents3 Oct
  7. 2024AgentMonitor: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Predictive and Secure Multi-Agent Systems27 Aug
  8. 2024BadAgent: Inserting and Activating Backdoor Attacks in LLM Agents5 Jun
  9. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
  10. 2024Watch Out for Your Agents! Investigating Backdoor Threats to LLM-Based Agents17 Feb
  11. 2024Secret Collusion among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganography12 Feb
  12. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents18 Jan
1 more
  1. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep

Other references · 17

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  3. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,988
  4. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
  5. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
  6. 2023Prompt Injection attack against LLM-integrated Applicationscited by 605
  7. 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?cited by 604
  8. 2024TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agentscited by 392
  9. 2023Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defensescited by 364
  10. 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 326
  11. 2023Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 264
  12. 2024Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Securitycited by 260
5 more
  1. 2024The Landscape of Emerging AI Agent Architectures for Reasoning, Planning, and Tool Calling: A Surveycited by 168
  2. 2024LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domaincited by 59
  3. 2024Shall We Team Up: Exploring Spontaneous Cooperation of Competing LLM Agentscited by 48
  4. 2024API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMscited by 39
  5. 2024FinVision: A Multi-Agent Framework for Stock Market Predictioncited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 26.

26 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2026Auditing Agent Harness Safetycited by 11
  2. 2026FlowSteer: Prompt-Only Workflow Steering Exposes Planning-Time Vulnerabilities in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 7
  3. 2026Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 7
  4. 2026Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Orchestration Tracescited by 5
  5. 2026Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agentscited by 4
  6. 2026When Latent Agents Lie: KV-Cache Integrity in Multi-Agent LLM Collaborationcited by 4
  7. 2026CASPIAN: Online Detection and Attribution of Cascade Attacks in LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Cross-Channel Causal Monitoringcited by 3
  8. 2026Conjunctive Prompt Attacks in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 2
  9. 2026The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Securecited by 2
  10. 2026HARP: Measuring Harm Amplification in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 2
  11. 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systemscited by 1
  12. 2026SocialGrid: A Benchmark for Planning and Social Reasoning in Embodied Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
14 more
  1. 2026You Only Align Once: Propagating Cooperative Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems through Seed Agentscited by 0
  2. 2026MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
  3. 2026MESA: Prioritizing Vulnerable Communication Channels for Securing Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
  4. 2026Even More Deception: Objective Misalignment in Mixed-Motive LLM Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
  5. 2026From Monoliths to Swarms: A Study of Attack Surface Evolution in the Transition to Multi-Agent Web Systemscited by 0
  6. 2026Attacking and Defending Multi-Agent Collaborative Filtering Systems Through Connectivitycited by 0
  7. 2026Connecting the Dots in Agentic AI Security: A Cross-Dimensional Threat Taxonomy, Evaluation Maturity, and Open Challengescited by 0
  8. 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestrationcited by 0
  9. 2026Concealing LLM-Based Multi-Agent Topology via Phantom Structure Injectioncited by 0
  10. 2026MADBench: Benchmarking the Security of Multi-Agent Debatecited by 0
  11. 2026MiniRep: Robust Reputation-Based Aggregation for Multi-Agent Debatecited by 0
  12. 2026Deny Without Disabling: Authorization-Paired Evaluation and Control for Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
  13. 2026Loose Lips: Understanding Privacy Leakage in Agentic Dialoguecited by 0
  14. 2026AgentStripes: An Evidence-Graded Maturity Model for AI Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Breaking Agent Backbones: Evaluating the Security of Backbone LLMs in AI Agents
  2. 2025A Survey of Attacks on Large Language Models
  3. 2023Survey of Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models Revealed by Adversarial Attacks
  4. 2026Beyond the Leaderboard: A Synthesis of Tool-Use, Planning, and Reasoning Failures in Large Language Model Agents
  5. 2024Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents
  6. 2024Large Language Model Safety: A Holistic Survey
  7. 2026DUMA-Bench: A Dual-Control Multi-Agent Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agent Security
  8. 2026AgentSafeEvo: Adversarial Co-Evolution for LLM Agent Safety