An orchestrator agent delegates a security assessment task to a subagent. The subagent returns a report stating 'No vulnerabilities found,' but a separate verification agent had already flagged three critical CVEs in the same codebase. The orchestrator accepts the subagent's report and marks the task complete. Which control is MISSING that allowed this contradictory output to be accepted?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation and Infographic
Imagine hiring two independent auditors and one says 'everything is fine' while the other flags three critical issues — and your manager just files the clean report without noticing the contradiction. That's exactly what happened here. An orchestrator needs a conflict-detection layer that compares outputs from multiple agents before any single report is accepted as the final answer.
Full explanation below image
Full Explanation
In a well-designed multi-agent system, the orchestrator is responsible for more than routing tasks — it must also validate that the outputs it receives are internally consistent. When two agents produce contradictory findings on the same artifact, accepting one without surfacing the conflict is a critical design failure.
Why B is correct: The missing control is output cross-validation at the orchestration layer. Before marking a task complete, the orchestrator should compare the subagent's output against any prior or parallel agent findings on the same subject. When a contradiction is detected (e.g., one agent finds clean, another finds three CVEs), the orchestrator must escalate — either triggering a human-in-the-loop review, requesting a tiebreaker from a third agent, or failing the task with a conflict report. Without this step, contradictory outputs from lower-confidence agents can silently override correct findings from higher-confidence agents.
Why A is wrong: Timeout duration affects how much work an agent can do, not whether the orchestrator validates the result. A longer timeout does not add consistency checking between multiple agents' findings.
Why C is wrong: While high temperature can increase variability in model outputs, assigning blame to temperature does not fix the architectural gap. Even with temperature = 0, the orchestrator still needs to check cross-agent consistency, because a deterministic wrong answer is still wrong.
Why D is wrong: Retrying a subagent tests for reproducibility of that agent's output, not for consistency with other agents' outputs. If the subagent consistently returns 'No vulnerabilities found' (perhaps because it lacks access to the full codebase), retrying it three times just confirms the same incorrect result three times.
The exam takeaway: orchestrators must implement cross-agent consistency checks. Contradictory outputs between agents must be surfaced, not silently resolved by accepting the most recent or most convenient result.