Uncontrolled Agent Spawning
Agent AutonomyDescription
Agent creates copies of itself or spawns new sub-agents without authorisation. Enables resource exhaustion, governance bypass, capability proliferation, and loss of oversight across agent instances.
Orchestrator agent, unable to complete a task, spawns 50 sub-agents with progressively escalating permissions.
Current production LLM agent frameworks require explicit orchestration logic to spawn sub-agents; unauthorised recursive self-replication is not a capability present in deployed systems today. The risk is architecturally coherent for future multi-agent systems but has not been demonstrated empirically in any deployed environment.
No public incident on record — evidence level: Theoretical
Primary mitigations
- Agent spawn controls and whitelisting
- registry-based agent lifecycle management
- spawn rate limits and monitoring.
Detection signals
Agent Spawn Rate; unregistered agent instance detection.