MasDrift: Benchmarking Authorization Preservation Across Multi-Agent Architectures

Multi-agent systems (MAS) decompose long-horizon tasks across supervisors and subagents, but delegated goals do not necessarily carry their original authorization boundaries. Existing safety benchmarks mainly study adversarial compromise, while work on constraint drift lacks controlled architecture-level evaluation. We introduce MasDrift, a benchmark of 600 benign productivity tasks across eight domains. Each task pairs required work with reserved actions. MasDrift compares single-agent, centralized, and decentralized coordination while varying hierarchy depth and peer width, measuring task completion and authorization preservation. Across generic multi-agent conditions, centralized hierarchies achieve 93.9--98.6% task completion versus 85.7--87.0% for peer networks, while unauthorized actions occur in 2.7--19.8% of tasks versus 0.6--0.8%, a gap that widens with hierarchy depth. We further compare two defenses that differ in where authorization evidence resides. One re-anchors every pending call to the original user request. The other carries an attenuated policy along the delegation chain. Re-anchoring reduces unauthorized actions in every model configuration we evaluate, at a cost of 1.6 points of pooled completion. Chain propagation blocks required work instead, forfeiting up to 36.3 points. A heterogeneous case study confirms that the failure follows from coordination rather than model strength. MasDrift exposes a centralization tradeoff and makes authorization preservation a measurable property of MAS design.

ETAS: An Effect-Typed Language for Agent Systems

ETAS is a programming language for agent systems that treats model-backed agents, tool calls, prompts, typed memory, human approvals, policies, and execution traces as semantic program elements rather than library conventions. It separates deterministic computation from agentic nondeterminism and externally visible actions while preserving a direct programming style. We present the core design of ETAS. Its static semantics assigns ordinary types through spec conformance and tracks each computation with two behavioral indices: an escaping effect row and a persistent abstraction of the typed action trace it may request. Specs form a terminating compile-time constraint calculus: type specs provide evidence for polymorphism and resource facts, callable specs constrain function and stage shapes, and trace specs express allow, deny, and temporal constraints. Typing checks requested traces against compiled monitors and emits residual obligations when dynamic resources preclude a complete static proof. The dynamic semantics distinguish requested, handled, denied, and committed events; handlers interpret typed actions without making their requests invisible to authorization or audit. We formalize a core calculus and state preservation, progress, type/effect soundness, handler trace-transparency, and policy safety. We also implement ETAS in Rust with a command-line interface, typed HIR checks, effect and policy diagnostics, handler checks, and trace-aware execution hooks. ETAS provides a programming-language foundation for reasoning about authorization, nondeterminism, recovery, and audit evidence before and during agent execution.