Can prompts alone reshape multi-agent workflows without system access?

The flexibility that makes planner-executor multi-agent systems attractive is also their weakness. When a planner converts a prompt into subtasks, roles, dependencies, and routing paths, the prompt is not merely a request — it is the blueprint from which the entire collaboration is constructed. FLOWSTEER demonstrates that an attacker who never touches agents, tools, memory, or inter-agent messages can still steer behavior, because the planning step happens before any of that infrastructure is invoked. A single crafted prompt can bias how the workflow forms in the first place, raising malicious success by up to 55 percent over naive prompting and transferring across MAS setups even under black-box topology inference.

This reframes where multi-agent safety lives. Most existing defenses inspect the artifacts of coordination — the generated workflow, the messages exchanged, the tool calls made. But if the contamination enters at workflow formation, those defenses arrive too late. The attack surface is not the running system; it is the organizational act of deciding who does what and in what order. The counterpoint is that this requires the planner to be promptable at all — fully fixed pipelines are immune — but fixed pipelines forfeit the adaptive coordination that motivates planner-executor designs. This matters because it identifies workflow formation as a distinct security frontier, one that grows more exposed precisely as multi-agent systems become more flexible.