Echoing: Identity Failures when LLM Agents Talk to Each Other

Abstract: As LLM based agents interact autonomously with one another, a new class of failures emerges that cannot be predicted from single agent performance: behavioral drifts in agent-agent conversations (AxA). Unlike human-agent interactions, where humans ground and steer conversations, AxA lacks such stabilizing signals, making these failures unique. We investigate one such failure, echoing, where agents abandon their assigned roles and instead mirror their conversational partners, undermining their intended objectives. Through experiments across $60$ AxA configurations, $3$ domains, and $2000+$ conversations, we demonstrate that echoing occurs across three major LLM providers, with echoing rates from $5\%$ to $70\%$ depending on the model and domain. Moreover, we find that echoing is persistent even in advanced reasoning models with substantial rates ($32.8\%$) that are not reduced by increased reasoning efforts. We analyze prompt impacts, conversation dynamics, showing that echoing arises as interaction grows longer ($7+$ turns in experiments) and is not merely an artifact of sub-optimal prompting. Finally, we introduce a protocol-level mitigation in which targeted use of structured responses reduces echoing to $9\%$.