Position: Multi-Agent Systems Should Prioritize Concurrency Control

Abstract

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) promise scalable collaboration, yet adding agents often *reduces* reliability. This position paper argues that many MAS failures are fundamentally **concurrency control problems**: agents concurrently read and write shared state, and long LLM inference windows amplify the risk of stale reads, lost updates, and inconsistent outcomes. Failure modes commonly attributed to "coordination" or "communication" breakdowns can be mapped directly onto classical concurrency anomalies. Rather than treating these as emergent behaviors to be solved by better prompting or more capable models, we contend that MAS frameworks should incorporate explicit concurrency control mechanisms: conflict detection, isolation guarantees, and structured access to shared resources. Concurrency control should be a first-class design concern, not an afterthought.