Facts Without Rules: Boundary Metadata Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Handoffs

Abstract

Multi-agent LLM systems often coordinate by compressing an upstream interaction into a handoff artifact that downstream agents treat as shared state. We show that this handoff step is a structural source of privacy leakage: summaries preferentially preserve operational facts while weakening the boundary metadata that governs how those facts may be used---a failure mode we call \emph{summary collapse}. On a controlled multi-agent coordination testbed we measure marker survival with a human-validated judge ($\kappa = 0.74$), where $\sigma_b = 1$ means every boundary marker survives verbatim and $\sigma_b = 0$ means all are lost. Boundary-marker and operational-fact survival are nearly uncorrelated at the handoff level on both GPT-5-mini and DeepSeek-R1-32B (Pearson $r$ near zero): uncompressed free-text handoffs preserve boundaries at $\sigma_b \approx 0.80$, whereas a $25$-word budget drops $\sigma_b$ to ${\approx}0.57$ while operational-fact survival stays near ceiling. Controlled downstream tests reveal that protection depends on \emph{boundary explicitness}: vague languages leak in $73\%$ of GPT and $50\%$ of DeepSeek cases, while explicit constraints reduce leakage to under $15\%$ across all three tested models. A no-handoff single-agent control further shows the failure is not reducible to multi-agent topology as direct full-marker access still leaks more often than the operationalized handoff. Prompt-only mitigation and exact-string redaction only partially address the problem, while a gold-derived audience allowlist nearly eliminates leakage across models, showing that correctly identifying audience boundaries is the key factor.