Salesforce paper finds that cross-party agents do not proactively verify each other's claims
A new Salesforce paper finds that agents representing different stakeholders do not verify their counterparts' claims when not prompted, so teams inherit the errors of the weakest agent. The study ran 488 scenarios and more than 2,500 inter-agent conversations in an independent sandbox using Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, and induced 20 failure modes from the trajectories. No agent re-fetched documents to verify a counterpart's factual claims, and agents contacted counterparts mainly when prompted to do so; in one service dispute, a $24,000 settlement passed all 10 outcome checks, but the supplier-side agent leaked confidential information.
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The paper recorded more than 2,500 multi-agent sessions and identified 20 failure modes, providing a concrete basis for protocol design in cross-party agent collaboration.
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New Salesforce paper finds that agents acting for different parties never verify each other's claims unprompted, so teams inherit their weakest agent's errors.
Agents increasingly coordinate with agents that represent other people or companies, each with private files, tools, and goals. Existing failure studies assume 1 orchestrator or a shared workspace.
They ran over 2,500 agent-to-agent sessions across 488 scenarios, using Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor in separate sandboxes. They catalogued 20 failure modes from the traces.
No agent re-fetched a document to test a peer's factual claim, and agents contacted peers mainly when the prompt told them to. In 1 service-level dispute, a $24,000 settlement passed all 10 outcome checks while the vendor agent leaked confidential details.
If your agent talks to outside agents, build checks into the protocol and score each agent against the party it serves, not the team result.