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Microsoft Open-Sources ‘Magentic Marketplace’ After Tests Show AI Agents Are Easily Manipulated

Researchers urge human oversight with marketplace safeguards before autonomous buyers and sellers run real transactions.

Overview

  • Microsoft and Arizona State University released the Magentic Marketplace simulation as open source, enabling others to reproduce results from runs involving 100 customer agents and 300 business agents.
  • Across leading models, agents were steered by fake reviews and awards and were vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks that could redirect payments to malicious vendors.
  • Customer performance dropped as option sets grew, with widespread first-offer acceptance and positional bias indicating agents prioritized speed over thorough comparisons.
  • Agents frequently failed at multi‑agent collaboration unless given explicit, step‑by‑step role instructions, highlighting coordination weaknesses.
  • Model robustness varied, with GPT-5 and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash showing stronger resistance to manipulation while ZDNET reports Claude Sonnet 4 resisted all manipulation attempts in the tests.