The Confused Deputy Problem Just Hit AI Agents — And Nobody's Scanning for It

When Agent A asks Agent B to "deploy this to production," who verifies that Agent A has the authority to make that request? Who checks that Agent B won't receive escalated permissions it shouldn't have? Who ensures the delegation chain doesn't obscure the original intent? Nobody. That's the problem. Multi-Agent Is the New Default Every major AI platform now supports multi-agent architectures: Google's A2A protocol for inter-agent communication OpenAI's Agents API with handoffs Anthropic's Agent SDK with subagent spawning Microsoft's AutoGen for orchestrated teams The market is projected to hit $41.8B by 2030. Multi-agent is no longer experimental — it's shipping to production. But here's what the launch announcements don't mention: every delegation is a trust boundary, and almost none of them are being validated. The Confused Deputy at Machine Speed The confused deputy problem isn't new. It's been a known vulnerability in distributed systems since 1988. But in traditional systems, the