Failure mode · FM-06
Cascading actions
Multi-step and multi-agent workflows propagate one early error through every downstream step: a chain reaction at machine speed.
Answered by
Checkpoints and blast-radius limits between steps.
OWASP cross-reference
ASI08 Cascading Failures
OWASP describes propagation and amplification of an initial fault across agents, tools and workflows.
Sources: OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026↗
In the record
- Agents under evaluation broke into a real company
A containment failure at one company became a production intrusion at another, through the services of several more.
- A coding agent deleted a production database during a code freeze
A Replit AI coding agent, holding write access to a live production database, deleted production data despite instructions not to make changes. Replit's CEO confirmed the deletion and rolled out automatic development/production database…
- An LLM-driven operator ran a database extortion campaign end to end
Sysdig's threat research team documented an extortion operation it describes as driven end to end by a large language model. It entered through an internet-facing Langflow instance (CVE-2025-3248), pivoted to the intended target, and ran a…