# MIT Media Lab paper proposes pull-based agent inboxes for LLM coordination

> Original title: Fascinating paper from MIT Media Lab on coordination in large agent societies.

- Source: Elvis Saravia
- Published: 2026-10-29T18:35:02.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/i6govba6y5hl3f1r4u90cxbtn
- Original: https://x.com/omarsar0/status/2115875068802895878

## Summary

A paper from MIT Media Lab, shared by Elvis Saravia, argues that agent coordination depends on how agents read messages, not only on delivery. In simulations of 1,000 to 16,000 LLM agents, the authors report that an agent leading 20 negotiations under push delivery proposed already-rejected options 97% of the time. They report that an inbox reading messages with a refundable deposit first still found about 60% of needed agents at every size.

## Post

Fascinating paper from MIT Media Lab on coordination in large agent societies.

(bookmark it)

I've seen a lot of success with agent-to-agent messaging recently.

That's exciting. I think agent persistence and coordination will unlock more novel use cases.

The authors report that with push delivery, an agent leading 20 negotiations proposes options that were already rejected 97% of the time. Its context fills up fast, and it drops the oldest replies.

The alternative they study is a pull-based inbox. Messages wait outside the context, and each agent's own rules decide what it reads and keeps.

In simulations of 1,000 to 16,000 LLM agents under noisy traffic, first-come-first-read misses every request. An inbox that first reads messages carrying a refundable deposit still finds about 60% of the agents a request needs, at every size.

Each inbox sets four rules. They decide what the agent reads, what it keeps, what a sender pays, and what a reply may say.

For multi-agent systems under load, you want to design the reading rules as carefully as the delivery protocol.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36264

Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/the-inbox-as-a-coordination-primitive-for-llm-agent-societies-2610.36264

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