On Protecting Agentic Systems' Intellectual Property via Watermarking

Abstract

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.