Failure Index / Agent behavior · warning · OpenAI Agents SDK · CrewAI · LangGraph

Multi-agent handoff fails or loses context between agents

Control passed from one agent to another, but the receiving agent is missing context, the wrong agent was chosen, or the handoff bounced back and forth. Berkeley's MAST study attributes ~37% of multi-agent failures to exactly this inter-agent coordination class.

The error

openai agents sdk handoff not working
multi agent handoff loses context
crewai agent delegation fails

Root cause

Handoff descriptions are ambiguous (the model can't tell which specialist to pick), the handoff drops conversation state the receiver needs, or two agents' responsibilities overlap so they ping-pong the task between them.

The fix

Make each agent's handoff description state precisely WHEN to route to it (not just what it does), pass explicit structured context in the handoff rather than relying on transcript inheritance, and remove responsibility overlaps between agents.

Preventing it next time

Trace every handoff as a first-class step (from-agent, to-agent, context passed) — routing bugs are invisible in flat logs but obvious in a step replay.

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