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 / multi-agent-system-mas
Multi-agent system (MAS)
A system composed of multiple interacting AI agents — each with its own goals, memory, tool access, and decision logic — that communicate and coordinate to achieve individual or collective objectives.
What this means in practice
In governance terms, multi-agent systems raise distinct failure modes (collusion, cascading hallucination, emergent behavior) that single-agent governance regimes do not cover.
Synonyms
MAS , multi-agent architecture , agent collective
See also
- Agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol — The communication mechanism between AI agents — specifying message format, authentication, authorization scope, rate limiting, and audit logging.
- Multi-agent collusion — Emergent behavior where multiple AI agents coordinate against principal intent — sharing information, price-fixing, bypassing oversight, or colluding on a task the principals did not authorize.
- 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.
- Agentic AI — Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of taking autonomous actions in the world, making decisions, using external tools, and pursuing multi-step goals with minimal or no human intervention at each step.