Epistemic Sybil Resistance: Multiplying AI Agents Without Multiplying Evidence

Abstract

arXiv:2609.01873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems improve inference by spawning agents and synthesizing reports. But another agent is not another observation: apparently independent reports may descend from the same evidence, and genuinely independent evidence can produce nearly identical reports. We formalize this as an epistemic Sybil problem. A report Z is an epistemic Sybil extension relative to reports R when I(Theta; Z | R) = 0. No report-only aggregator can generally