Failure Modes of Multi-Agent Systems

MAST classification: 14 failure modes in three categories (system design defects, agent consistency failures, lack of execution checking).

Simple fixes give only ~15% improvement – these are fundamental architectural defects, not bugs. Agent failure is byzantine in nature: it doesn’t stop, but outputs plausible but incorrect conclusions.

Two engineering modes:

concurrent conflicts in shared filesystem – lost update is cured by optimistic version locking; semantic conflicts between files are harder;
cascading error amplification (“broken telephone”) – error grows consistency through several agents; cured by cross-checking and deterministic external feedback.