Morning Edition · Wednesday, September 16, 2026Published at 2:18 AM EDT · New York

Two New Papers Target the Agent Supply Chain, From Tool Calls to Payloads Hidden in Weights

One proposes defenses for tool-integrated agents that do not depend on the specific attack, the other examines malware concealed in model parameters using permutation symmetry.

Two submissions posted to arXiv on 16 September address opposite ends of the same problem: an agent's security now depends on artifacts it did not create. The first, "Universal Defenses for Tool-Integrated LLM Agents Against Adversarial Att…