[2603.20380] ALARA for Agents: Least-Privilege Context Engineering Through Portable Composable Multi-Agent Teams

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems arXiv:2603.20380 (cs) [Submitted on 20 Mar 2026] Title:ALARA for Agents: Least-Privilege Context Engineering Through Portable Composable Multi-Agent Teams Authors:Christopher J. Agostino, Nayan D'Souza View a PDF of the paper titled ALARA for Agents: Least-Privilege Context Engineering Through Portable Composable Multi-Agent Teams, by Christopher J. Agostino and Nayan D'Souza View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Industry practitioners and academic researchers regularly use multi-agent systems to accelerate their work, yet the frameworks through which these systems operate do not provide a simple, unified mechanism for scalably managing the critical aspects of the agent harness, impacting both the quality of individual human-agent interactions and the capacity for practitioners to coordinate toward common goals through shared agent infrastructure. Agent frameworks have enabled increasingly sophisticated multi-agent systems, but the behavioral specifications that define what these agents can do remain fragmented across prose instruction files, framework-internal configuration, and mechanisms like MCP servers that operate separately from individual agent definitions, making these specifications difficult to share, version, or collaboratively maintain across teams and projects. Applying the ALARA principle from radiation safety (exposures kept as low as reasonably achievable) to agent context, we introduce a declarative context-agent-tool...