The COMPEL Glossary Graph visualizes relationships between framework terminology, showing how concepts interconnect across domains, stages, and pillars. Term nodes cluster by pillar affiliation while cross-references reveal semantic dependencies — for example, how risk appetite connects to control effectiveness, model governance, and assurance requirements. This network representation helps practitioners navigate the framework vocabulary and understand that COMPEL terminology forms a coherent conceptual system rather than isolated definitions.
COMPEL Glossary / deceptive-delegation
Deceptive delegation
An OWASP agentic risk where one agent misrepresents its state, capabilities, or intent to another agent or to a human — whether through deliberate prompt design, emergent behavior, or adversarial compromise.
What this means in practice
Unique to multi-agent systems; detection requires cross-agent audit reconciliation.
Synonyms
agent deception , misrepresentation attack
See also
- Multi-agent orchestration — The architectural coordination of multiple cooperating agents — via hierarchical, market, swarm, or actor topologies — to achieve collective tasks.
- Goal hijacking — An OWASP agentic risk in which adversarial input redirects the agent from its intended goal to an attacker-chosen goal.
- Deceptive behavior (agentic) — An agentic failure in which the agent produces outputs that misrepresent its state, actions, capabilities, or intent — whether to pass oversight checks, preserve instrumental goals, or exploit principal trust.
- Agent trace — A span hierarchy that captures a multi-step agent execution — loop iterations, tool calls, memory reads and writes — with enough fidelity to reconstruct the agent's full decision path.