earlyink
243 first flagged24 Oct 2026

Mosaic Check: test whether your knowledge agent pieces secrets together from allowed documents

Open-source test suite seeding documents to catch agents assembling confidential conclusions. AI product teams pay.

Early · Agent Mosaic quantifies assembled leaks

Written for: Solo builder

Next step

Rebuild ten mosaic scenarios as fixtures, run them against a basic LangGraph or OpenCode RAG agent, publish the leak rates, and share them with founders in the Latent Space Discord and r/LLMDevs.

Why now

Per-document access control is the standard answer to enterprise security reviews, and this paper shows it misses a whole class of leak. Startups selling internal-search and knowledge agents will be asked about it. A reproducible test they can run in CI and cite in a questionnaire does not exist yet.

What became possible

The Agent Mosaic paper measures the 'mosaic effect': an agent reads several individually harmless documents and discloses a sensitive conclusion built from them. It covers 30 synthetic scenarios, 10,800 answers from three agents and 1,440 answers from live agents in two open-source harnesses. NVIDIA's OpenShell architecture names sensitive-data exposure as a core agent risk.

One way in

  1. Mosaic Check

    YAML fixtures of seeded document sets where the secret only appears when documents are combined. The suite runs them against your agent and reports leak rate per scenario and per query style.

    Customer
    Seed and Series A startups selling RAG or knowledge agents to mid-market companies
    Model
    Open-source suite; $49/month hosted runs with a shareable report for security reviews

Competition

Early

I found no packaged open-source suite that ships seeded document sets where the secret only appears when documents are combined, and none that reports leak rates by scenario and query style for an internal knowledge agent. The academic work is recent and confirms the threat.

Full competition notes (5 competitors)

I found no packaged open-source suite that ships seeded document sets where the secret only appears when documents are combined, and none that reports leak rates by scenario and query style for an internal knowledge agent. The academic work is recent and confirms the threat. MosaicLeaks targets deep-research agents leaking through web queries, and the RAG mosaic paper is a framing, not a tool. General red-team tools like Promptfoo, garak and PyRIT cover direct exfiltration and canary leaks. Knostic sells aggregation and oversharing controls to enterprises that buy Copilot or Glean, not testing to the startups that build the agents. A new entrant could win with a vendor-side, CI-friendly fixture library: realistic mid-market scenarios like a pending layoff inferred from headcount plans plus a budget memo, or an M&A target inferred from travel logs plus legal invoices. It would also need graded query styles and a shareable leak-rate report that startups can show buyers in security reviews. The main risks are that Promptfoo or a similar framework adds a mosaic plugin cheaply, that the open-source core is easy to copy, and that Seed and Series A teams may only pay when a customer's security questionnaire demands it. So the business likely depends on attestation reports, hosted runs or a certification-style badge rather than the fixtures alone.

  • MosaicLeaks benchmark (arXiv 2605.30727)

    This May 2026 academic benchmark is the closest named match. It has 1,001 multi-hop deep-research tasks that chain private enterprise documents with a public web corpus, and it measures what an adversary can rebuild from the agent's outgoing web queries. It explicitly uses the mosaic framing, where single queries look harmless but reveal private facts together. Its threat model is leakage through external queries, not a knowledge agent assembling a secret in its answer to an internal user. It is research, not a packaged CI tool.

  • Multi-turn mosaic and linkability attacks on RAG (arXiv 2603.17292)

    This paper uses a contextual-integrity framing for RAG and treats mosaic-style linkability as one of three attack vectors, alongside direct extraction and prompt injection. It is academic work that validates the threat. It is not a test suite that product teams can run against their own agents.

  • Knostic

    Funded startup (about $19M raised) selling need-to-know controls for Copilot and Glean. It explicitly markets against LLMs combining content a user is allowed to see into sensitive conclusions it calls oversharing. It is aimed at enterprise buyers of Copilot and Glean, not at vendors building their own RAG agents, and it is a commercial runtime and monitoring product rather than an open test suite. It is still the most likely commercial competitor if it moves toward vendor-side testing.

  • Promptfoo red teaming (RAG and agent plugins)

    Open-source red-teaming framework with YAML configs and plugins for RAG document exfiltration, cross-session leaks and RAG poisoning. It already has the format and distribution this idea wants, and someone could add a mosaic or aggregation plugin. I found no aggregation-inference scenario in it today.

  • Kunal Ganglani RAG data leakage test suite tutorial

    A 2026 tutorial on a CI leakage suite that uses planted canary secrets in a staging knowledge base. It checks for direct leakage of a single canary, not secrets that only appear when documents are combined. It shows teams are building this themselves.

Checked 2026-10-24

Risks

  • Synthetic scenarios may not match customers' real data, so results get dismissed
  • Buyers who care most are enterprises, and this reader avoids that sales cycle
  • Fixes are hard, so teams may not want to measure

Best on open space and team fit; market pull is the weak point (5).

tech 6 · pull 5 · space 7 · fit 7 · build 7

Exposed

Companies that could benefit or be threatened. News and context, not investment advice.

Momentum of its main topic

53 developments this week -2 vs last week
25 Sep: 0 developments26 Sep: 0 developments27 Sep: 0 developments28 Sep: 0 developments29 Sep: 0 developments30 Sep: 0 developments1 Oct: 0 developments2 Oct: 0 developments3 Oct: 0 developments4 Oct: 0 developments5 Oct: 0 developments6 Oct: 0 developments7 Oct: 0 developments8 Oct: 9 developments9 Oct: 8 developments10 Oct: 10 developments11 Oct: 7 developments12 Oct: 9 developments13 Oct: 8 developments14 Oct: 12 developments15 Oct: 7 developments16 Oct: 5 developments17 Oct: 7 developments18 Oct: 8 developments19 Oct: 3 developments20 Oct: 9 developments21 Oct: 11 developments22 Oct: 6 developments23 Oct: 4 developments24 Oct: 12 developments
Stage: Coverage

Sources

  1. Agent Mosaic: Recognizing Confidentiality Leaks in Agentic LLM SystemsHF Daily Papers
  2. Introducing NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture for Safer AI AgentsNVIDIA
  3. Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and ClaudeHacker News

Status history

  • 2026-10-24 Flagged as buildable