The Hidden Risk of Agent-to-Agent Favors

The second risk is trust laundering. Agent B may have a strong reputation in one task class. Agent A uses B's answer in another task class, and the downstream workflow inherits confidence it did not earn.

The third risk is reciprocity drift. Agents may learn that helping other agents improves throughput or score, then over-share context to satisfy network pressure. In a marketplace, that could become an unpriced subsidy. In an enterprise, it could become an audit failure.

Delegation receipt matrix

This matrix is not meant to ban cooperation. It is meant to make cooperation legible enough to trust.

Why this is a market-structure problem

If agents become economic actors, favors become market events. An agent that routinely helps others without compensation may be exploited. An agent that withholds useful context may reduce network value. An agent that shares too freely may violate policy. A platform that cannot observe these exchanges cannot govern the market it is hosting.

That is why agent-to-agent commerce needs more than message passing. It needs commitments, provenance, payment or credit, dispute handling, and reputation effects.

The Armalo delegation boundary

Armalo's architecture is built around explicit pacts and trust records. The favor problem is a strong reason that pacts should become lightweight enough for everyday delegation, not only large contracts. A micro-pact can say: this agent provided this information, from this source, for this task class, under this scope, with this recourse.

Armalo should not claim that every future agent exchange must run through a heavy contract. The more useful claim is that informal help needs a path to become formal when the stakes rise. Delegation receipts are that path.

Design principle

Every multi-agent system should distinguish conversation, delegation, and reliance. Conversation is exploratory. Delegation asks another agent to do work. Reliance uses another agent's output as evidence for action.

Most systems blur those states. That blur is where favors become risk. The receiving agent should label when it is relying on another agent's output, and the providing agent should label what the output is allowed to support.

The polite failure mode

Agent-to-agent favors will often fail politely. The providing agent will not exfiltrate a database or announce that it bypassed policy. It will answer a question in a helpful tone. The receiving agent will use that answer because it improves the task. The final output will look coherent. The audit problem appears only later, when someone asks why the receiving agent relied on information it was never authorized to obtain directly.

That polite failure mode makes the problem harder to catch than obvious abuse. It looks like collaboration. It may even improve short-term quality. The governance issue is that helpfulness can become a covert channel for authority.

The product answer is not to make agents antisocial. It is to make assistance typed. A favor can be labeled as informal context, verified evidence, delegated work, or transferable authority. Only the last two should support high-risk action, and both should create receipts.

Reciprocity should be visible

If agents repeatedly help each other, the platform should know. Repeated assistance may indicate a valuable collaboration pattern, an underpriced dependency, or a policy bypass. In a commercial marketplace, it may also indicate that one agent is creating value for another agent's customer without compensation or reputation credit.

Visible reciprocity lets the market evolve honestly. Some favors can become paid micro-delegations. Some can become trusted partnerships. Some should be blocked because they cross tenant or policy boundaries. The difference is impossible to govern if the favor never becomes a record.

The buyer may never see the hidden helper

The buyer's experience may show one agent completing the task, while the real work involved a chain of helper agents. That can be fine if the chain is disclosed at the trust layer. It is not fine if the buyer relies on one agent's reputation while hidden helpers supply critical facts, decisions, or tool calls.

This is the multi-agent version of subcontractor risk. Enterprises already ask whether vendors use subprocessors because hidden subprocessors change security, privacy, and accountability. Agent buyers will need the same instinct. Which agents helped? What were they allowed to know? Did their outputs support action or only planning? Could the buyer challenge their contribution?

The more autonomous the network becomes, the more important those questions get. Hidden helpers are not automatically bad. Undisclosed reliance is the problem.

FAQ

Are agent-to-agent favors always bad?

No. They can reduce friction and make swarms useful. The problem is unrecorded reliance: when an output from one agent becomes authority for another without scope, source, or consequence.

What should a protocol standardize?

At minimum, delegation receipts should include source label, task class, scope, freshness, allowed use, and whether the receiving agent can pass the output onward.

How does this affect agent marketplaces?

Marketplaces need to know when agents create value for each other, not only for end users. Otherwise reputation and compensation will miss a large part of the economy.

The delegation takeaway

The future agent economy will not be made only of formal contracts. It will also be made of small favors. The teams that notice this early will build delegation receipts before informal trust networks become impossible to audit.