mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Got a Secret? LLM Agents Can't Keep It: Evaluating Privacy in Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv 2605.27766 ↗First posted 26 May 2026cs.AIcited by 1

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

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Abstract (arXiv)

LLM safety evaluations predominantly test models in isolation, yet deployed AI agents increasingly operate within persistent social environments alongside other agents. We introduce a Moltbook-style simulation platform where thousands of LLM agents interact across communities over a simulated month, and use it to evaluate privacy as a downstream safety concern under varying degrees of social pressure. We find that shifting from single turn to multi turn social evaluation amplifies privacy violations (CIMemories 19.95% to Ours 45.30% across OpenAI models), that leakage is socially contagious, with agents 8 times more likely to disclose sensitive information after observing a peer do so, and that explicit privacy instructions reduce but do not eliminate this effect, leaving leakage rates above 37.8% even with safeguards. Our findings suggest that static chat based safety benchmarks systematically underestimate risks in agentic deployment, and that social context alone is sufficient to elicit sensitive disclosures that single turn evaluations would never surface.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 23 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

Builds on

23 of 47 references.

References · 23

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,492
  2. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,541
  3. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,945
  4. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,417
  5. 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,365
  6. 2022Red Teaming Language Models with Language Modelscited by 1,014
  7. 2024Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attackcited by 384
  8. 2023SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agentscited by 357
  9. 2022What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy?cited by 195
  10. 2024Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populationscited by 118
  11. 2024OpenCity: A Scalable Platform to Simulate Urban Activities with Massive LLM Agentscited by 35
  12. 2024Conformity in Large Language Modelscited by 32
11 more
  1. 2026"Humans welcome to observe": A First Look at the Agent Social Network Moltbookcited by 26
  2. 2025CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMscited by 24
  3. 2026OpenClaw Agents on Moltbook: Risky Instruction Sharing and Norm Enforcement in an Agent-Only Social Networkcited by 19
  4. 2023Are Chatbots Ready for Privacy-Sensitive Applications? An Investigation into Input Regurgitation and Prompt-Induced Sanitizationcited by 17
  5. 2026Does Socialization Emerge in AI Agent Society? A Case Study of Moltbookcited by 13
  6. 2026Collective Behavior of AI Agents: the Case of Moltbookcited by 12
  7. 2026The Anatomy of the Moltbook Social Graphcited by 10
  8. 2026Agents in the Wild: Safety, Society, and the Illusion of Sociality on Moltbookcited by 10
  9. 2025Operationalizing Data Minimization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Promptingcited by 8
  10. 2024FRACTURED-SORRY-Bench: Framework for Revealing Attacks in Conversational Turns Undermining Refusal Efficacy and Defenses over SORRY-Bench (Automated Multi-shot Jailbreaks)cited by 6
  11. 2026Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbookcited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2026AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
  2. 2025Beyond Jailbreaking: Auditing Contextual Privacy in LLM Agents
  3. 2026AgentSocialBench: Evaluating Privacy Risks in Human-Centered Agentic Social Networks
  4. 2025The Sum Leaks More Than Its Parts: Compositional Privacy Risks and Mitigations in Multi-Agent Collaboration
  5. 20251-2-3 Check: Enhancing Contextual Privacy in LLM via Multi-Agent Reasoning
  6. 2024Privacy Leakage Overshadowed by Views of AI: A Study on Human Oversight of Privacy in Language Model Agent
  7. 2026Information-Theoretic Privacy Control for Sequential Multi-Agent LLM Systems
  8. 2026SOTOPIA-TOM: Evaluating Privacy and Information Management in Multi-Agent Interaction with Theory of Mind