Multi-User Large Language Model Agents
Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed as assistants in planning and decision making, yet most existing systems are implicitly optimized for a single-principal interaction paradigm, in which the model is designed to satisfy the objectives of one dominant user whose instructions are treated as the sole source of authority and utility. However, as they are integrated into team workflows and organizational tools, they are increasingly required to serve multiple users simultaneously, each with distinct roles, preferences, and authority levels, leading to multi-user, multi-principal settings with unavoidable conflicts, information asymmetry, and privacy constraints. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multi-user LLM agents. We begin by formalizing multi-user interaction with LLM agents as a multi-principal decision problem, where a single agent must account for multiple users with potentially conflicting interests and associated challenges. We then introduce a unified multi-user interaction protocol and design three targeted stress-testing scenarios to evaluate current LLMs' capabilities in instruction following, privacy preservation, and coordination. Our results reveal systematic gaps: frontier LLMs frequently fail to maintain stable prioritization under conflicting user objectives, exhibit increasing privacy violations over multi-turn interactions, and suffer from efficiency bottlenecks when coordination requires iterative information gathering.
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd1001f
Shu Yang
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10020
Shenzhe Zhu
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10021
Hao Zhu
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10022
José Ramón Enríquez
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10023
Di Wang
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10024
Alex Pentland
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10025
Michiel A. Bakker
69dd001b65e6d8cd9cd10026
Jiaxin Pei
Multi-User Large Language Model Agents
Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed as assistants in planning and decision making, yet most existing systems are implicitly optimized for a single-principal interaction paradigm, in which the model is designed to satisfy the objectives of one dominant user whose instructions are treated as the sole source of authority and utility. However, as they are integrated into team workflows and organizational tools, they are increasingly required to serve multiple users simultaneously, each with distinct roles, preferences, and authority levels, leading to multi-user, multi-principal settings with unavoidable conflicts, information asymmetry, and privacy constraints. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multi-user LLM agents. We begin by formalizing multi-user interaction with LLM agents as a multi-principal decision problem, where a single agent must account for multiple users with potentially conflicting interests and associated challenges. We then introduce a unified multi-user interaction protocol and design three targeted stress-testing scenarios to evaluate current LLMs' capabilities in instruction following, privacy preservation, and coordination. Our results reveal systematic gaps: frontier LLMs frequently fail to maintain stable prioritization under conflicting user objectives, exhibit increasing privacy violations over multi-turn interactions, and suffer from efficiency bottlenecks when coordination requires iterative information gathering.
Multi-user large language model agents face challenges in handling conflicting objectives, privacy preservation, and coordination efficiency in multi-principal decision-making scenarios.
large language models multi-user interaction multi-principal decision problem instruction following privacy preservation coordination stress-testing scenarios