On Protecting Agentic Systems' Intellectual Property via Watermarking
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into agentic systems that perform autonomous reasoning and tool use has created significant intellectual property (IP) value. We demonstrate that these systems are highly vulnerable to imitation attacks, where adversaries steal proprietary capabilities by training imitation models on victim outputs. Crucially, existing LLM watermarking techniques fail in this domain because real-world agentic systems often operate as grey boxes, concealing the internal reasoning traces required for verification. This paper presents AGENTWM, the first watermarking framework designed specifically for agentic models. AGENTWM exploits the semantic equivalence of action sequences, injecting watermarks by subtly biasing the distribution of functionally identical tool execution paths. This mechanism allows AGENTWM to embed verifiable signals directly into the visible action trajectory while remaining indistinguishable to users. We develop an automated pipeline to generate robust watermark schemes and a rigorous statistical hypothesis testing procedure for verification. Extensive evaluations across three complex domains demonstrate that AGENTWM achieves high detection accuracy with negligible impact on agent performance. Our results confirm that AGENTWM effectively protects agentic IP against adaptive adversaries, who cannot remove the watermarks without severely degrading the stolen model's utility.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Watermarking Graph Neural Networks via Explanations for Ownership Protection
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the mainstream method to learn pervasive graph data and are widely deployed in industry, making their intellectual property valuable. However, protecting GNNs from unauthorized use remain…
Agentic Copyright Watermarking against Adversarial Evidence Forgery with Purification-Agnostic Curriculum Proxy Learning
With the proliferation of AI agents in various domains, protecting the ownership of AI models has become crucial due to the significant investment in their development. Unauthorized use and illegal distribution of these …
IPGuard: Protecting Intellectual Property of Deep Neural Networks via Fingerprinting the Classification Boundary
A deep neural network (DNN) classifier represents a model owner's intellectual property as training a DNN classifier often requires lots of resource. Watermarking was recently proposed to protect the intellectual propert…
General ClassificationSupervised GAN Watermarking for Intellectual Property Protection
We propose a watermarking method for protecting the Intellectual Property (IP) of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The aim is to watermark the GAN model so that any image generated by the GAN contains an invisible…
Watermarking Neuromorphic Brains: Intellectual Property Protection in Spiking Neural Networks
As spiking neural networks (SNNs) gain traction in deploying neuromorphic computing solutions, protecting their intellectual property (IP) has become crucial. Without adequate safeguards, proprietary SNN architectures ar…