# Trust and Reputation Routing

> Maintain a per-agent reputation score updated from outcome quality and peer feedback — penalising agents whose outputs show signs of directive disclosure.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Routing & Composition
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/trust_and_reputation_routing/

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## Description
**Short description**: Reputation scores route tasks to historically reliable agents and demote agents whose outputs include signs of inadvertent directive disclosure — treating Agent Confession as a quality and trust signal.

**Intent**: Continuously refine task routing toward agents with strong outcome records, and build directive-disclosure events (Agent Confession instances) into the reputation signal so agents that confess their instructions lose routing share.

**Context**: A platform hosts many agents. Routing is currently by static rank or round-robin. There is no mechanism to penalise an agent that has been observed reproducing directive content under adversarial prompting — even though such an agent is both a security liability and a poor steward of operator trust. Reputation routing creates a feedback loop that naturally reduces the share of traffic routed to vulnerable agents.

**Solution**:
- Maintain a per-agent reputation score updated after each task from outcome signals: deterministic success, user rating, peer review by another agent.
- Add a directive-disclosure signal: if post-processing detects that an agent's output contained system-prompt or charter content (an Agent Confession), apply a reputation penalty.
- Route new tasks by reputation-weighted sampling with a small exploration term for newcomers.
- Decay reputation over time; surface scores in operator dashboards with disclosure-event annotations.


## Use Cases
- Multiple candidate agents per task with varying historical quality and varying susceptibility to Agent Confession.
- Outcome signals — including directive-disclosure detection — are observable and can feed the reputation update.
- Operators want a vocabulary for 'this agent is trusted with sensitive directives, this one is not'.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Agents that confess directives under adversarial prompting naturally lose routing share as their reputation decays.

- Operators gain a structured, data-driven vocabulary for agent trustworthiness that includes confession risk.

- Composes with coalition formation — high-reputation, confession-resistant agents preferred in privileged multi-agent pipelines.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- An agent optimising for the reputation signal may suppress directive content in outputs without actually fixing the underlying vulnerability.

- Cold-start exploration must be carefully tuned; new agents have no reputation history and cannot be assessed for confession risk until they have processed real traffic.

- Reputation can entrench legacy agents even when newer, better-hardened alternatives exist.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/trust-and-reputation-routing/)